Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Selves Without Centers

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza
Introduction

Yeats’ verses, written at the end of WW I, portray the poet’s sense of a disintegrating world, a world whose center no longer holds. This poem appropriately begins this essay because the whole poem not only reports the disintegration of a cultural center but also looks forward to a new social organization. Yeats ended his poem with these words:

;but know I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats’ message of one epoch disintegrating and another taking form speaks to the Postmodern perception that a major cultural shift is underway. In this essay we address the them of disintegration of identity directly. For the Postmodern writer we engage in this essay holds that no abiding natures, subjects or essences exist—either for persons or for societies. In this writer’s view, death and nihilism make Premodern and Modern assumptions of a human nature, a human subject or human essence irrelevant and false.

In its place, Postmodern writers propose conceptions of a plural or fragmented self, or a self defined in an unending process of interpretations of things and people. This essay engages one important Postmodern view of human identity from a Christian perspective. The Postmodern perspective is that of contemporary Italian writer and teacher, Gianni Vattimo, recognized by some as Italy’s most important contemporary philosopher.

The premise for this essay is that that western Christians, and eventually all Christians worldwide, will and should engage Postmodernity’s views of human being or human nature. Postmodernism is a label for contemporary thinking in many fields —in the arts, in philosophy, in social and cultural analysis—that break with, or at least challenge and stand in tension with, Premodern and Modern ideas.

Christians should engage Postmodern thinkers, because their themes of are of central concern to Christian concerns. In general, Postmodern writers are decisively secular and critical of, if not outright hostile, to Christianity and the Christian tradition. But Postmodern writers address the meaning of history, human nature, the characteristics of modern society and changing patterns of human relationships. Christian theology, at all levels, wants to engage these themes. Therefore, Christian thinking today should engage Postmodern writers.

This essay is the Fourth in a series on Christianity and Postmodernism. This fourth essay has a certain logical continuity with the two parts of the preceding Essay Three. In Essay Three, Part A, we explored Postmodern sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s thesis that images (mainly electronically generated, digital images) are redefining contemporary people’s relationships to “things in the world.” Increasingly oriented to images of things, rather than to their originals, contemporary people are less immediately related to “the world of objects.” Baudrillard emphasizes that the difference between images and originals is disappearing in contemporary awareness; that we relate to images as we did to “real objects,” and that relations with “real objects” is becoming less important than our relations to copies and images of these objects.1

A consequence of the new rule of digital images in contemporary life, say Postmodern writers, is that Premodern and Modern ideas of the self are increasingly irrelevant. The reason for this irrelevance is that Premodern and Modern thinking defined the human self in relation to real objects in the world. Classical Greek metaphysics, within which classical Christian theology developed, and Modern philosophy, long working in the paradigms established by Renee Descartes certainly did so. Modern, western philosophy after Immanuel Kant , added a subjective element, for Kant believed that we can’t know things in themselves but only know things as they appear to us in the forms of our understanding. Nevertheless, Kant believed that things in themselves do exist. In that sense, Kant remained in the Premodern and Modern world view.

These Premodern and Modern authors helped forge the “subject-object” dichotomy that many contemporary philosophers, including feminist and environmental social critics, have so roundly criticized. For the subject- object model is also the assumptive framework for the natural sciences and technology but also for the social sciences, insofar as they use the natural sciences as their paradigm of scientific knowledge.2 Further, feminist writers perceive the Modern subject-object dichotomy as male determined and patriarchal: a supposedly autonomous mind stands over against the objects of the world and knowledge is for the sake of control.

G.W. F. Hegel’s profound philosophy complicated and enriched this Cartesian and Kantian subject-object model by presenting a dialectical notion of the self.3 Yet Hegel’s and Karl Marx’s dialectical notion of the self still assumed a centered self, an “authentic self, ” which emerges as the result of an inward process of reconciliation of aspects of the self and society which are originally in tension. All these Premodern and Modern views of the self assumed that the human subject relates from its enduring, single, center to a collection of preexisting and interconnected objects in the world. Postmodern writers deeply question this model of reality.

Martin Buber’s, the very influential Jewish philosopher and theologian’s distinction between I-Thou and I-It relationships, so important in Emil Brunner’s and Karl Barth’s theologies, also assumes the subject-object model, in so far as the I-Thou relationship is dialectically dependent on and defined in contrast to the I-It relationship. “Environmental” anthropologies, i.e., philosophical understandings of the self as engaged with the world, e.g., those of Max Scheler, Adolf Portmann, Helmouth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, whom theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg drew on in his Systematic Theology, also work within the traditional Cartesian or Kantian paradigms.4 As much as the subject- object model of the self and reality is criticized today, the Premodern and Modern models of an underlying human subject related to a world of an independently existing collection of other subjects and objects dominates Premodern and Modern views of human being. Postmodern writers on “human nature” reject all forms of this model. In this essay we focus on one such Postmodern critique.

The Method of this Essay

Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s special interests in philosophy include aesthetics and the philosophical inheritances of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He merits being viewed as an outstanding Postmodern philosopher.5 This essay concentrates on Vattimo’s Postmodern view of the self; I do not try to present other Postmodern writers who, like Vattimo, propose views of the self radically critical of Premodern and Modern views.6

After presenting Vattimo’s view, I engage it from the standpoint of some basic New Testament perspectives on the human self. The goal in this second part of the essay is to contribute to a theological foundation that Christian practical theologians, either in the academic or in the parish setting, can use. Christian pastoral theologians and pastors will be working with and encountering the Postmodern persons Postmodern writers discuss and describe. Pastoral theologians and pastors will need to think through implications of Postmodernism’s view of the self for the practice of their ministries. I do not try to make that connection here. That means I don’t try to draw any implications for pastoral counseling, preaching, church administration, celebration of the sacraments implied by Vattimo’s views. This would over-step the boundaries of my competence, not to speak of the framework of an essay.
I. Gianni Vattimo’s Nihilistic Theory of the Self

1. The “Self” is Radically Conditioned by Time and History

Vattimo’s understanding of human being starts from a shared Postmodern conviction: human beings are radically determined by time and history. No aspect of human existence transcends history and time; no unchanging, immortal essence or substance floats above historical contingency. Vattimo, like other Postmodern writers, concludes that the existence of a single, shared, unchanging human nature underlying human thinking and acting is a fiction. By “fiction” they mean an idea constructed by people and used to justify their actions to themselves or others. Saying the Premodern and Modern ideas of a human subject, human essence or human nature is a fiction means that these concepts do not refer to something really existing. The concepts exist, but they are ideological constructs humans used to meet certain needs, for example to assign blame or to justify their actions in different ways.

[Those readers wishing to review traditional Premodern metaphysical views of the self can refer to the four Appendices to this essay. In them I summarize Plato’s, Aristotle’s, St. Augustine’s and St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings about human nature. ]

When explaining his idea of the human existence, radically conditioned by time and history, Vattimo draws on the writings of the late modern German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger presented his analysis of human existence first and most influentially in Being and Time, a book that has become a classic of contemporary philosophy. In later writings, the writings of the so-called ‘later Heidegger, ‘ Heidegger shifted his philosophical focus from an existential analysis of human being to the question of Being more generally, and to Being’s relation to beings, to language (especially poetry), and to technology. Despite this shift or turn (referred to in German writings as Heidegger’s Kehre /turn) Vattimo thinks that the later Heidegger retains fundamental ideas about human existence developed in Being and Time. These views Vattimo shares and defends in his writings. 7

To spell out his understanding of human existence as radically temporal and historical Heidegger (and Vattimo) use categories of event or happening, (in German Ereignis) rather than categories of substance or essence to speak of human existence.8

So, for example, they speak of human life as “thrown” into existence (geworfen, from werfen, to throw or cast). By describing human life as Geworfesein (being thrown) into existence, Heidegger and Vattimo highlight that our existence is passively given to us, something that we receive, and that we are born into a place and time which we do not choose. No one asked to be born; we each find ourselves in a particular place and time of the world and history and we face the task of making something of our lives where we find ourselves. Being thrown into being (Geworfensein) is a fundamental mark of human existence.

2. Existence as Da-Sein/Being-there.

Heidegger’s special term for human existence as “thrown” into being is da-sein. Literally, da-sein means existence; but in German “da” means “there” and “sein” means “to be.” The word “da-sein”, therefore, can express the sense of human existing as “being there, ” i.e., being in a particular time and place, in a framework of life. If we stress the “da ” (there) of da-sein, we highlight the sense that the self is always located, always in the world in a specific time and place. If we focus on the sein (being) of da-sein, the meaning is that “there -ness,” specific place and time, radically conditions our being. Thus, Heidegger’s da-sein helps contrast his existential sense of the self with a traditional western metaphysical view. The Premodern, Greek metaphysical view is that the self is or has an eternal, unchanging substance existing in a world where time and place don’t run through it’s center, but are merely accidents.9

Plato and Aristotle, followed by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, described the essence of human nature as a substance or essence that is inherently immortal. Aristotle and Thomas did grant the body more importance to human being; they stressed that human beings are both soul and body; the soul is the form or principle of identity of the body. But the rational aspect of the soul, the mind or intellect, is what makes humans distinctively human and this aspect of the soul is immortal by nature. 10

An important aspect of Heidegger’s analysis of human existence as “being thrown” and as da-sein, is his explanation of what it means for da-sein, a human being, “to have a world.” Heidegger breaks with a long tradition in western philosophy, a tradition running at least from the Pre-Socratic philosophers to Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. For this traditional view, the world is a framework of things which preexists individual existence, a framework present (vorhanded) to us as a collection of beings related to each other’s by cause and effect. 11

Heidegger rejects this version of “world”, holding that it is reification, an abstraction after the fact, of something more primordial to human existence. Heidegger’s (and Vattimo’s) version of human existence in the world is captured in the phrase “a person’s life-world.” When we reflect on “our world” from the standpoint of our actual existence, we perceive that the objects of our world are not simply “there” as disconnected, meaningless things. Rather, the world is always and first of all “our world” or “my world” i.e., things and people who have meaning in relation to our or my project of living. To explain his view of being “in the world” Heidegger, in Being and Time, used the example of the tools a carpenter has near at hand. These tools are not simply there, disconnected from the carpenter’s tasks; the tools are not simply vorhanded, collected around the carpenter as meaningless objects. These tools are “ready to hand” (zuhanden) ; the carpenter knows these tools as objects needed and available for accomplishing his projects as a carpenter. This example of the carpenter’s tools helps explain Heidegger’s idea of Da-sein “having a world.”

The example of the carpenter doing his or her jobs and living his or her life helps explain another of Heidegger’s key terms for explaining human existence as da-sein. This term is Entwurf, which in English can be translated as “draft,” “sketch, ” “design” or “plan.” Heidegger uses Entwurf12 to highlight each person’s life as a project. A project, like a rough draft or a sketch, is not fully completed. A project is something directing us toward the future, something we are “in to” or “moving toward,” but have not finished. Each person’s life has a project character, Heidegger says. Human existence, da-sein, as Entwurf, as project, also implies that each person’s life goes out from himself or herself toward the future in a unique way; each person’s life project is uniquely his or her own.

We can pause in our exposition of Heidegger for a moment to observe that we all know what Heidegger means about being “in the world” and about our life as Entwurf, from our experience of either showing or receiving (or trying to show or trying receive) empathy. Empathy means “feeling with, ” and this feeling is not merely at the level of emotions but is much more comprehensive. To empathize in the fullest or truest sense with another is to project one’s self into another person’s life-world trying, to “see things” as he or she sees them.13 Thus our knowledge of “empathy,” either as something we try to show another or something we hope to receive from another, shows us that we can look at a person’s existence from the outside, objectively, or from the inside, as he or she experiences it. Heidegger and Vattimo believe that “the world” first means that each of has his or her own world, i.e., our way of relating to things and persons around us based in our project of living our lives.

3. Existence Unto Death (Sein zum Tode)

We have seen that Heidegger explains the meaning of “world” in terms of each person having his or her own life world, each person’s life being his or her own project.14 And we have seen that this “life world” is closely connected to the individual’s project of living out his or her life. Heidegger deepens the inner connection between human existence as da-sein in the world by claiming that the project of living out one’s existence takes form and coherence only because we know that the time of our existence is limited. That is, each of us knows, in one way or another, that we are going to die. A person’s existence, and his or her world, takes on a form, a meaning and coherence only as da-sein actively affirms his or her own death.

We might get closer to Heidegger’s meaning by reflecting on our ordinary experience of doing things. Especially as we get older, we know we don’t have all the time in the world left to accomplish what we would like to do. In the light, so to speak, of our own acknowledged mortality, our finitude, our certainty of dying, we organize our projects our plans or life. A common saying expresses this basic idea: “ on the scaffold, things come into focus.” Facing one’s imminent death, one’s priorities are easier to see, one’s life world assumes clearer contours.

Heidegger distinguishes two basic ways da-sein can relate to his or her own certain death. One way is to regard death as something that happens to other people, as in the phrase, “yes, people die.” This view, Heidegger suggests, is a form of psychological defense against the finality and destructiveness of death. Heidegger and Vattimo have a very strong theory of death; indeed, they view death as annihilating the meaning of a person’s life project and they see the universal fact that everything dies as grounds for a particular kind of nihilism. They, with Nietzsche, believe that that nothingness and meaningless belong to the ultimate texture of reality and that whatever partial understanding, meaning and sense-able world we have comes only in relation to death.15

Adopting this external view of death (death happens to other people or to people generally), is one way da-sein can try to evade the nihilistic implications of death. Heidegger, however, considers such an external view of death as an inauthentic way of human existing, inauthentic if only because certainly untrue. Each of us is going to die; death will be a black hole into which our life projects fall. Therefore, a second, more authentically human relation to one’s death is to acknowledge its truth and, indeed, accept this truth in all its nihilistic implications.

Heidegger speaks of this attitude toward death as more authentically human for a specific reason. One’s own death is uniquely one’s own, in the sense that no one can die one’s death. Each must dies his or her own death. Indeed, in our mass production, mass consumption world, where tools and organizational technology exercise ever tighter and more total control over our existence, one’s own dying and death may be the only thing that is unsubstitutible in our lives. In this sense, Heidegger says our death is our “own-most” possibility, i.e., the one aspect of our life that is most uniquely, inevitably and inalienably ours. By accepting my death as my “own-most” possibility, my existence achieves a kind of authenticity that it lacks if I think of death as something that happens to people in general but not to me in particular.

4. Living into One’s Death and Having a World

Facing and accepting the reality of one’s death in this way is “realistic” in another, profounder, way. In this orientation to one’s own death, one’s existence as a project comes as fully into view as is possible. By living into my own death, my life, as Entwurf, as my project, achieves a wholeness (Ganzheit), analogous on a large scale to a carpenter’s tools revealing themselves as tools in his/her life world only in relation to the carpentry projects he/she undertakes. By appropriating one’s own life as an existence unto one’s own death, one’s world as “life world” rises up around one. Thus, Heidegger thinks that the ultimate ground for a person “having a world” is the inevitability of their death.

Heidegger’s meaning about having a meaningful world is analogous to the function of context for the meaning of a text. Indeed, we will see that the link between existence and interpretation is very close for Vattimo. We all know that the meaning of words, whether spoken or written, depends greatly on the context or the framework in which they appear. The word “burning” has the meaning of a destructive fire in a newspaper report of a house burning down. Burning” has another meaning in the context in which a person’s desire is described. Analogously, the act of pushing a knife into a human body has two completely different meanings, depending if the context is a surgical operating theater in a hospital or a back alley in a city. No true interpretation of text without taking the context into account.

Analogously, living into one’s own death defines one’s world and this “definition” functions as a context that determines the meaning of the “text” of the things in one’s world. Vattimo, indeed,, thinks that Heidegger analysis of the death defining force of one’s world as project means that things in the world have meaning, are signifiers, before they are objects. Understanding one’s own world and that of another, therefore, requires acts of interpretation. For “world” means that “space” within the framework of da-sein’s project in which things appear as something particular, something meaningful. Meaning, for Vattimo, is not the mind grasping the essence or natures of things, but meaning and knowing is always and only interpretation. Hence Vattimo thinks the philosophers of hermeneutics, the philosophers of interpretation theory, are indispensable for an adequate philosophical account of human existence.

Wes have seen that Heidegger’s key idea, especially developed in the existential analysis of Being and Time, is that one’s relation to one’s own death establishes a context in which the things in one’s world take on a meaning. This relation to one’s own world establishes the most basic framework of one’s life-project and thereby is the foundational events for letting things appear as “something” in one’s life world.

A simple, though very serious example is familiar to all pastoral counselors. If a middle aged man or women is told, completely unexpectedly, that they will almost certainly die within the year from some inoperable and lethal disease, the “things” in their life take on a new vividness. What is more, most people in this situation reevaluate their priorities; what is really important to them becomes clearer. This example helps clarify what Heidegger means by saying that one’s world, and the meaning of things in it, “rise up” in relation to one’s own death as apprehend, i.e., as realized in awareness and anticipation.

5. Human Identity and Interpretation

We have seen that Heidegger rejects the usual understanding of “world, ” as the sum of experiencable objects. This was the Premodern and Modern conception of world. In place of this view of “world” Heidegger proposes that the individual things in a person’s world ore constituted only within each human being’s life project as existence unto death. In relation to one’s death, things disclose themselves as some-thing, as real and meaningful.

One major implication, just alluded to above, an implication drawn by Heidegger, probably by Friedrich Nietzsche, and certainly by Vattimo, is that the horizon , i.e., the life-world, is not a structure of relationships among objects but is a structure of interpreted meanings. The things in one’s life world are meaningful, i.e., they are a meaning; that is, they are interpretations. An interpretation is seeing something as something. The carpenter sees the sharp-edged metal object as a saw, and sees the saw as a tool needed to cut wood. The mother sees the biological object, analyzable by scientists as chemical and physical substances and processes as her daughter whom she would do anything “in the world” to protect from harm.

To have a world, therefore, really means to live in a context of signs and meanings which one knows, which one understands. Each person always commands a language—the language of signs and meanings constitutive of their world. Verbal language—spoken or written—is a secondary layer of signs and meanings that can “work” only because the “things” in one’s life world are already significant, i.e., already meaningful signs.

Therefore the relation between language and things is twofold. On the one hand natural or artificial languages, e.g., English or mathematical symbols, can express the meaning things have for us in our individual or shared world. However, things themselves are signs that are understood and need to be brought to speech. Especially poetic language, the language of metaphor, –a major theme in Heidegger’s later writings and important to Vattimo as a philosopher of aesthetics—is especially fit to open to us new ways of seeing things as something different from how we have interpreted them in the past.16 Metaphors enable us to see something in a new way. But also things as signs and as meaningful in our life world, “push us “ to “put them into words.” Language opens us up to things as they are and can change our perception of things in the world. But things can forcefully impress their reality on us such that we are pressed to find words to express them in their own intrinsic meaning.17

6. “Subject” as a Reification of Meaning and Action

We are finally close to speaking about Vattimo’s dismissal of the idea of a human subject. The human subject is not an existing reality; rather, it is a meaning, an interpretation. The concept of a human nature, a human subject or a human essence derives from a prior reality, which is not an essence, thing or nature, but an event. That event is the enacting of power, an action. Classical metaphysical assumed that nature or essence precedes actions as their ground, source or principle. Vattimo denies this and follows Friedrich Nietzsche critique of this Premodern and Modern metaphysics.

As mentioned already, Vattimo thinks that the human subject is literally a fiction, i.e., something fabricated by the human mind. Vattimo thinks that Heidegger’s analysis of human existence is fully in line with Nietzsche’s. But to spell out the implications for the idea of a human subject or center, Vattimo depends on Nietzsche.18

To approach Vattimo’s meaning that the human subject is a fiction, we can start with the metaphysical framework Vattimo rejects, i.e., traditional western metaphysics, established by Aristotle and Plato and transmitted through the Middle Ages into the Modern Era by Christian theology.

This traditional western metaphysics postulates the existence of an eternal realm or ground of being, in which resides truth and beauty and which makes itself known as forceful presence in the things of our experience, including ourselves. In this traditional metaphysics each thing in the world is both a particular substance and an act of existing. For Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas) God’s essence is the act of existing; all other things have an essence that also exists. In this metaphysics, Being makes itself known as presence, evidence, force, stability, energy, as causes or principles of actions or events. Essence and existence are not identical in worldly things, and being always precedes doing. 19

We have seen that Vattimo, following Heidegger, rejects this traditional metaphysics. What we call essences or substances are reifications, “thing-i-fications” after the fact of interpreting things to be such and such in the horizon of our life worlds. The things of our world, including ourselves, are not first of all substances or essences preexisting our interpretation of them; they are our interpretations. We label them this or that thing; we can attribute essences or substances, souls, wills to them. But behind or before this labeling and reification are our acts of interpretation, seeing something as something.

In bringing the action of interpretation and meaning-giving that lies before and behind the categories of essence, cause, effect, substance to light, Vattimo thinks Friedrich Nietzsche made one of his lasting contributions to human understanding. For Nietzsche insisted that behind the language of essence, cause, being, substance, truth, beauty and goodness always lies an act of interpretive assertion, of hermeneutical forcefulness positing one way of looking at reality against another way and over another way. Like Nietzsche, Vattimo thinks that traditional metaphysics are human constructs grounded in forceful acts of interpretation, of choosing to see something as something.

This way of dealing with traditional metaphysical concepts led Nietzsche to what is now a famous kind of analysis, i.e., genealogy, i.e., tracing the roots of key moral and religious ideas back to the acts of willfulness which is their real ground and source. Nietzsche examines traditional claims about truth, beauty, goodness, virtue, etc and aims at unmasking the power acts which lie behind them.20 On the one hand this genealogical analysis is a kind of liberating unmasking. Genealogical analysis unmasks the “human all too human” sources in will to power that lie behind our grand claims to truth, beauty and goodness.

But more fundamental, genealogical analysis uncovers a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, texture to reality, namely “will to power.” 21 That is Nietzsche’s basic aim is not to unmask, even though he seems to enjoy shooting arrows at traditional morality and ideals. His deeper aim is to engage in what he thinks is real life, namely acts of power, acts of “going beyond” the given meanings of the world. This going beyond, this over-coming, this transcending what is given from the past is what real life is all about; it is the activity of those who are really robust and vital; it is the activity of the Ueber-Mensch, the Over-Man.

Vattimo holds that some readings of Nietzsche have missed this deepest aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. One reading, rather superficial, is based on the enthusiasm that some Nazi theorists showed for Nietzsche. This reading of Nietzsche champions him for praising the strong who crush the weak, the strong that are willing to show and assert their strength, AND Nietzsche’s language of decadence that needs to be overcome by the assertion of power. This reading of Nietzsche’s Ueber-Mensch naturally informed racist ideology, an ideology of Aryan supremacy and the right to reclaim German Lebesraum, (Life Space.) Nietzsche’s writings certainly lend themselves in places very easily to this reading. But Vattimo thinks this is too superficial.

A second reading, which Vattimo also thinks is inadequate, sees Nietzsche as the champion of appearances and arbitrary interpretations of things, liberated from all social and internal constraints. This reading of Nietzsche champions a communicative chaos in society, an anarchic destroyer of past meaning structures and the source of a theory of an explosion of life views, unhampered by the deadening hand of past ideas of “goodness,” truth,” and “beauty.” This “libertine” reading of Nietzsche, which Vattimo the Italian , sees as especially attractive to French intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze,22 is also insufficient. It does not do justice to Nietzsche’s application of self-transcendence to himself. For Nietzsche applied to himself his philosophy that life is will to power, that real life means overcome every existing boundary, so that life is always an project into the abyss of nothingness beyond all that is presently given. Nietzsche called such a dedication “heroic” , and it may have contributed to his eventual insanity.

7. What Remains?

What Premodern and Modern people have called eternal, unchanging truth, goodness, beauty and virtue, natures, subjects and essence are, in fact, fictions. What does that leave Vattimo with? Remaining a hermeneutical—an interpretive— relation to the tradition of human thinking and human practice. Vattimo (like Rorty) counsels giving up the search for The Truth, The Good, The Beautiful, The Authentic and Reconciled Existence. We should settle for something less. This lesser way is an infinite task of interpreting the life-worlds of those different from us, those from the past and the present. This way of life is less grand: it makes no claims that one will or has found absolute truth; therefore, it has no basis for coercing others to “see The Truth.” What remains is not trivial: the very humane and meaningful project of trying to understand the life worlds of other people and other eras, as these are passed down in the documents, written and otherwise, of the past.

Rather than claiming that we have The Truth, The Good, The Beautiful, and thinking we are obliged to bring others to the light, we become aware of the horizon of our own asking and seeking truth; we try to identify as fully as possible with the horizon of truth and understanding of those in the past we are trying to understand, and we seek a merging of our horizon of understanding, with their horizons or presuppositions, of “the other’s understandings.”23 The results will always be a partial understanding. Further, as Nietzsche said, every interpretation involves a certain amount of force, of unfairness, of displacement.24 For interpretation is always seeing something as something in relation to the interpreter’s own life world. More or less violent readings of the monuments of the past are possible; but every interpretation of the words of another involves “appropriation” —a certain taking possession of —the thoughts and life of another, a kind of overcoming and conquering. Nietzsche saw this and said we should be brave enough to live into this truth by practicing it.

But the interpreter can be aware of doing a certain amount of violence; and this awareness can sustain a sense of self-irony, of tolerance, a sense of humor, a sense of one’s own limitations. But tolerant, ironic, modest relationships with others are not a terrible way to live, Vattimo holds.25

8. Four Truths

Before turning to the second part of this essay, we can identify three truths in Vattimo’s views that must be addressed by Christian theology.

The first is that we must all die. Death is the inevitable termination of each of our existences, of communities, of nations, and probably of the earth.

Second, death, by defining the horizons of our existence, does help define “our worlds”; setting the boundaries in which things take on meaning as the things of our world.

Third, Vattimo is correct that death is nihilistic. Death is not just a biological event; it entails the end of “our world.” We can leave traces and relics of this world behind, our monuments, so to speak. But these have meaning only so long as someone exists who can give them a meaning. The time will come when no one will or can give meaning to anything I leave behind. 26 If this world is all there is, the time will come when no one remembers me, and I will, from a worldly standpoint, attain the status of never having existed.

Fourth, therefore, Heidegger and Vattimo are surely correct that each of our “worlds” is not a collection of neutral, meaningful objects but are a collection of meanings; things interpreted as something in relation to our life projects. Meaning is interpretation.
II. One New Testament Perspective on the Self

1. Our Method

Having the above picture of one Postmodernist view of the human subject before us, we have a partner to engage from a Christian point of view. Our method will be to draw from St. Paul’s writings in the New Testament to identify important Christian perspectives on human being and the human subject.

We acknowledge that identifying some of St. Paul’s perspectives, as evidenced in New Testament texts accredited to him, falls far short of presenting “the Christian view of the human subject.” Indeed, deciding what would count as “the Christian view” on any topic. Would this mean interpreting all the views Christian theologians have ever held on the subject? Fulfilling that requirement is impossible.

However, any view of human being or the human subject that merits the label “Christian” must at the least not contradict, and at the most, should be in harmony with the New Testament. All branches of Christianity —not just the Churches of the Reformation—share this biblical norm for Christian teaching. Conformity with Scripture is a criterion of adequacy for any allegedly Christian teaching. St. Paul’s writings, though not the only important corpus of New Testament texts, are certainly one very important corpus. Therefore, using St. Paul as a basis for Christian teaching, while a minimal requirement, is nevertheless sufficient as a responsible standard of Christian teaching for this essay. 27

2. Christian Faith, Meaning and Death

I begin by readily acknowledging that appeal to Scripture (or a part of the New Testament, as in this essay) as a resource for a Christian view of human being requires an act of interpretation, a reading of an ancient document’s perspective from our perspective. The Bible is exactly one example of what Vattimo, Heidegger and Gadamer mean by documents from the past that offer a “life- world” we today can engage from within our own life-horizon. The meaning we seek is an interpretive meaning.

Yet, Christians have no reason to object to Vattimo/Heiddeger/Gadamer’s view that all human understanding involves interpretation. On the contrary, Christians have always claimed that the Holy Scripture is a horizon in and through which God opens the scope of His mind and life to human beings. This divine initiative in self-disclosure is what Christians mean by Revelation. And the Scriptural Principle, referred to above, embodies the belief that God’s self-disclosure is authentically witnessed to in the Scriptural writing.

The Christian belief that God opens His horizon of understanding, His mind, to human beings, through the Scriptures, may contradict what appears to be an unstated assumption of Vattimo’s and Heidegger’s: that horizons of understanding can only be this-worldly in the sense of excluding a transcendent, divine horizon of truth. Vattimo certainly believes that meaning, i.e., having a world in which things appear as some-thing, only happens for a person as he/she projects his/her existence toward the abyss of death that annihilates all meaning.

However, death is something that Christians have heard of. Christians believe that God has included human death, meaninglessness and nothingness into His own horizon of being and meaning through Christ’s death and resurrection. That God, in Christ’s death and resurrection God has emptied death, as a final destroyer of life and meaning, is part of what Christians mean by Redemption through Christ.

That death swallows all meaning is only true if this world and human memories are all there is. But Christians don’t believe this. Christians believe that God has included death, i.e., each person’s inevitable death, within Christ’s death, and by Christ’s resurrection included this death into the horizon of His life and meaning, Christians don’t share Vattimo’s or Nietzsche’s nihilism. Death is not the end of human meaning, Christians dare to believe.

Thus, Christians can certainly speak with Vattimo about human existence as being an existence unto death. However, the Christian discourse about existence under death is not generated from the self’s own projection of his/her life toward his/her “own-most” possibility, i.e. the abyss of nothing/death. For Christians believe that while the abyss of death man be a person’s own most possibility outside of Christ, in Christ, a life-horizon exists that includes but then transcends mortal death. Thus, to say that Christians have an even more radical understanding of mortality

Hence, Christians hold that God both transcends the world but also has disclosed God’s self through the people of Israel and uniquely and in an unsurpassable way through Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made flesh. Christians believe that Israel and Christ are known (to us who are still living in the world) only within the world. But Christians believe that Christ is the Word of God made flesh, i.e., God’s mind made history, made worldly. Though a part of the world, Christ opens to humans (Christians believe by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ and the Father) a perspective that transcends this world, i.e., God’s own horizon of understanding. Vattimo, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer may or may not believe this fundamental article of Christian faith. They give no reasons for their “secular” dogma that this world is the only possible and final horizon for understanding. They assert this as a kind of assumption or dogma. Perhaps this assumption is a an example of an act of choice without reasons, an act of will which Nietzsche and John Paul Sartre champion. But Christians need not copy this arbitrary choice. On the contrary, Christians believe God’s Holy Spirit opens their eyes to a divine horizon of truth and meaning, which, though enacted in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, is grounded beyond this world. This way of seeing is what Christians call faith.

Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of traditional theological and moral ideals, Heidegger’s analysis of the historical contingency of our existence, and Gadamer’s view that all interpretation involves a never fully achieved merging of past and present horizons, have taught the Christian community a lot. Christian thinkers are much more aware, after Freud, Marx and Nietzsche—whom Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the “Masters of Suspicion” —of how beliefs, including Christian teachings, can function as ideology to evade moral responsibility, mask power motives and power structures.28 Christians can learn from Gadamer that interpreting documents from the past, including the Bible, is a creative task, which involves a certain “forcing” of text as we appropriation them our purposes and needs. These insights can, and for many Christians have, generated greater modesty, tolerance, and readiness to listen to others; a greater awareness of limitations to all Christian, but also to all non-Christian and anti-Christian points of view.

3. Perspectives from St. Paul’s New Testament Letters

a. “In Christ, a New Creation”: Paul’s “Extrinsic” Self

St. Paul is the New Testament writer who, more explicitly and more fully than any other, thematized the self from the perspective of a believer in Christ as Lord and Savior. One of Paul most fundamental convictions is that another, Jesus Christ, radically determines his existence or his identity.29 He further believes that his identity is inseparable from that of other believers who, with him, have been baptized ‘into the one body’, i.e., into the Body of Christ. This justifies saying that Paul thinks of himself as a plural self.

The decisive other for Paul is Jesus Christ, who confronted Paul on the road to Damascus and transformed Saul from a persecutor of Christians into a Paul, an apostle for Christ to the Gentiles. Paul’s Letters contain many ways of speaking about Christ as the Other who decisively determines his own identity.

In one place (I Corinthians 6: 12-20) Paul use the language of slave buying: he, as all Christians, was “bought with a price.” The payment was Christ’s suffering and death. But the result is that Paul thinks of himself and his fellow believers are “no longer their own.” They belong to Christ or to God. Their “bodies” were “meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the Body.” Their bodies are “members of Christ.” In this part of his Letter, Paul draws some conclusions of this belief in relation to fornication and prostitution.

In another place, I Corinthians 10, Paul speaks of the Eucharist as a “sharing in the body of Christ,” a sharing that “we who are many are one body” among themselves. The context for these verses is a discussion of idol worship, a worship that often involved eating food that had been offered to idols and then put on sale in the public market. The purchasing of this food by some Christians deeply troubled other Christians. This conflict of conscience causes Paul to address this theme. For us, the key point is Paul belief that in eating the bread and drinking the wine, he and other believers were sharing in Christ himself, and sharing in Christ, they shared one’s another’s lives as “members of the one body.”

Paul Letters are full of the language of identification with and striving for the welfare of other Christians. This language can appear extreme to our Post-Christian ears, for example when Paul writes, that “I give thanks to my God always for you” I Corinthians 1: 4-10); or, when he calls his fellow Christians “Brothers and Sisters” (Romans 10:1); or “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you” Philippians 1:3-4). This extremely personal and heart-felt language derives from Paul’s conviction that in Christ, believers are deeply connected with each other. His life is their life in Christ, and their life is his life.

b. Paul’s Plural Identities

Paul’s conviction that in Christ he is members with other in the Body, helps explain Paul’s language of plural identities. In his First Letter to the Corinthians (9:19-23) , Paul describes himself as having a kind of plural identity. The context of this section is his self-description of his identity as an apostle, i.e. as one sent by Christ to proclaim the Gospel. In this context he calls himself “a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.” He explains this slavery in terms of an identifying with other person’s in their different identities, for the sake of evangelization —sharing the Gospel. Paul writes,

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I might share in its blessings.”

In this sense Paul speaks about having plural identities.

This passage gives no hint that he is schizoid in a clinical, psychotic sense. That is, this passage does not disclose Paul as having more than one personality, any one of which could emerge on cue against “Paul’s” will. On the contrary, Paul in the context of this whole chapter is speaking about his freedom. One aspect of his freedom in Christ is his willingness and perhaps ability to identity with the life horizons of very different people —people under the law, those outside the law, the weak. Yet, this passage makes very clear that Paul is not “out of control” of his identity. On the contrary, in this chapter of I Corinthians, and in other places in his Letters, Paul stands forth as a very powerful, self-confident, indeed, forceful personality.

At the least, Paul’s self-understanding of himself evidenced in this passage is not adequately expressed in the categories of a static substance. Rather, his identity has traits similar to those Vattimo descries. Paul’s identity is dialogical, not with the horizon of documents from the past, but with people in their different life horizons. Paul’s identity seems strong enough to go “beyond” a tightly held and guarded selfhood. Indeed, Paul in this passage shows traits of Nietzsche’s Uber-Mensch, the person who wills to “go beyond”, can transcend, his given identity. Nietzsche might not like the idea that St. Paul, an Ur-Christian, embodies the very traits he champions of the Ueber-Mensch and which he calls “heroic.” But the analogy seems hard to dispute.

c. Paul’s Annihilated Self

In his letters, Paul develops a radical discourse of an annihilated self, which, however, is very different from Nietzsche’s or Vattimo’s nihilism. Thus, speaking about Christian life as a life for others, he can write about all believers that:

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (II Corinthians 5:14-15)

Another example is, again, in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter four. The context is Paul’s discourse about Jesus Christ as the center of Christian proclamation and ministry and, the support that provides Paul and Christians in the face of failure, persecution and human limitations. The following passage is an example of Paul’s radical language of “being dead”:

But we have this treasure (the Gospel) in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (II Corinthians 4: 7-12)

Paul believes that the framework of meaning for his life is Jesus’ death and resurrection. In Jesus’ death, all who believe and are baptized are included; in Jesus’ death, believers have also died.

Paul’s speaking about “being dead” and “death being at work in us” (Christians) might be interpreted as “merely” metaphorical language. But Paul’s description of baptism as a real sharing in Christ’s death shows he is making ontological statement, claims about the status of his existence. Thus, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk newness of life…..For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Epistle to the Romans 6:3-5)

In words similar to that of Vattimo Paul speaks of death as the framing context of his existence. But the death Paul means is Jesus’ death, which for Paul and for Christian faith is not a black hole, or a wall, but a doorway.

d. Transformations of the Self

Any review of perspectives on the self in Paul’s Letters would be incomplete if it left out Paul’s references to the transformation of the self in Christ. As is well known, Paul understood his existence, and that of every Christian, as in a tension between the new life held in Christ and shared in now by faith and baptism, on the one hand, and the fullness of possession of new identity in Christ in the future. The “now” condition is being in Christ by faith and baptism, already sharing by faith and hope the benefits of God’s reconciling grace in Christ. The “not yet” is the full possession of a reconciled identity that will be enjoyed only in the future. 30 The tension between “already and not yet” is, however, a dynamic tension marked by the requirement and empowerment for change. Christianity’s traditional language of sanctification refers to this process of identity change.

Paul can describe the Christian life as a transformation from within.

“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” (II Corinthians 4: 16)

Or he can describe the transformation of his existence as moving toward a goal.

“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal (the resurrection from the dead); but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3: 12-14)

In another place, Paul says the whole creation as, “groaning in labor pains” waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:22-23) In this context Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as a “first fruits” and of Christian hope “that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21)

Paul thus understands Christian identity as extrinsic, grounded in a person outside itself. The key idea of eccentricity—being oriented to another —-has two aspects. One, and the primary aspect, is that Paul believes his identity is graciously determined from beyond himself by God in Jesus Christ. God in Christ has made Paul God’s own, an identity grasped by faith and hope. Being determined, in a gracious and saving way, from beyond oneself is the fundamental “other” orientation for Paul and for every Christian.

But being “in Christ” brings a second movement, a second going beyond the self. This is a going beyond the self toward the neighbor in various kinds of service and care. This is the movement of Agape love, where a person’s identity is shaped by the love of Christ that goes beyond the borders of the self to be with and for the other.

Paul sees the link between God’s moving beyond God’s self toward creation in Jesus Christ, on the one hand, and the believers moving beyond him/herself toward the neighbor. There is an inner connection between Christ being for the self and the self-being for the neighbor. As Christ loved us, so ought we to love one another; this is the connection between the two movements of “going beyond.”

Paul’s writing on human identity formed by self-giving love, God’s love in Christ and the derivative service of others by the believer, suggests a model of identity which is more completely thought through in the Trinitarian doctrine of God. The teaching that God is One Essence in Three fully Divine Persons means that God’s identity is self-surpassing, an eternal going-beyond. The technical vocabulary of Trinitarian theology includes perichorisis (Greek—mutual indwelling) and circumincessio (Latin—mutual indwelling). These technical words point to the Christian intuition that God’s identity involves or includes an all-encompassing movement “toward and into the other.” An earthly analogy is love between married partners where each gives him/herself to the other such that there are not just two separate individual but also one personal unity. Ephesians, a New Testament Letter , traditionally attributed to Paul, in Chapter 5 sees the spousal unity in difference as “sign” of Christ’s love of the Church.

The Trinity Doctrine of God establishes an ecstatic or extrinsic notion of identity into the very being of God. Between such a Trinitarian God understanding and the Christian teaching that God was in Christ reconciling the world,” on the one hand, and the Christian moral norm of “let us love one another as Christ has loved us” there is a deep analogy and resonance.
Conclusion

In this essay we have engaged one important Postmodern author on the theme of human identity. Vattimo’s view draws radically from the wells of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer. These thinkers want to think through the nature of human being as radically conditioned by time and history. From Friedrich Nietzsche Vattimo appropriates the belief that all concepts of an abiding human essence or nature are by- products of a more fundamental reality, i.e., life force or will to power. Accepting Nietzsche’s “deconstruction” of traditional metaphysical notions of the self, Vattimo agrees that human identify , conceived as an abiding essence, a continuing subject, are ideological constructions, a way human thinking constructs fictions to give accounts of and hold people accountable for their actions. Thus, Vattimo thinks that traditional metaphysical and moral concepts of subject, person, essence, human nature are “fictions” in the literal sense of ideas constructed a posteriori, after the fact, of acts of power and will.

Vattimo thinks the deepest meaning of Nietzsche’s Ueber-Mensch is that “true” human existence is an active nihilism. Nietzsche’s “heroic person” exists only in acts of overcoming old meanings for the sake of creating ever-new meanings. The “Over” ( “Ueber”) of the Ueber-Mensch is not , in its deepens meaning, dominating the weak for the sake of demonstrating one’s power. The deepest meaning is overcoming what oneself has been, creating the self anew and, in so doing, stepping over the old self. But Vattimo makes very clear that he thinks Nietzsche does not mean that the heroic self overcomes an old self to finally achieve a fixed essence. No, the “essence” is in the going beyond the old self; is creating a self that should, itself, next be transcended. Likewise, Vattimo is convinced that Nietzsche’s unmasking work, Nietzsche’s genealogical deconstruction of traditional norms and ideals, in such works as Beyond Good and Evil and A Genecology of Morals, is not for the sake of uncovering some true, abiding, essential truth. No. The unmasking is for the sake of creating new fictions; one deconstructs the old meanings for the sake of creating new meanings, which in turn should be deconstructed. The point is not to reach a state of final, stable, essential meanings. The point is the going beyond; the action of transcending the given borders of meaning.

In the existential anthropology of Martin Heidegger, both the early Heidegger of Being and Time and the later Heidegger after the “Kehre”, Vattimo finds a rich description of human existence radically determined by time and history. From Heidegger, Vattimo learns that the objects of our world are not —as Premodern metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle or Modern metaphysics of Descartes or Kant—simply there before we live our lives. Rather, thinks Vattimo, experiencing things as what they mean for us, i.e., “having a world, ” flows from da-sein fully embracing his/her death as his/her own-most possibility. Taking one’s death into one’s life in this way is the most powerful way is given “a world.” One’s own death, as one’s own -most possibility, constitutes one’s existence most fully as a project; and this allows the unveiling of things as meaningful beings in our world.

Knowledge, understanding and meaning, consequently, are not the mind’s grasp of abiding essences, of natures or substances that are simply “there” before and independently of our existence unto death. But Vattimo’s negation of traditional metaphysical notions of truth and knowledge does not imply that the enterprise of knowing, of understanding and finding meaning are senseless enterprises. Meaning is the merging of the horizons of our world with the “worlds” of others from the past and present who are different from us. Knowing and finding meaning are the fruits of attempts of understanding, of going over, “ueber” the borders of our horizons of understanding to welcome the life horizons of others present and past. Vattimo thinks that Hans Georg Gadamer has provided thus far the fullest exposition of knowing and meaning as interpretation, i.e., as hermeneutics. Thus, Vattimo thinks, we are all creator of meanings, constantly.

This kind of meaning is not the foundational meaning that traditional metaphysics called TRUTH; GOODNESS; BEAUTY. Vattimo’s meaning is not the mind grasping the essences or natures of things; discovering their basic principles or causes and purposes. These ideas—essences, natures, and substances—are fictions. Rather, knowing and meaning flowing from the infinite task of interpretation, of merging of life horizons. This kind of meaning is more modest in its truth and certainty claims, for this kind of meaning does not grasp foundational essences but consciously sees things as something by acts of interpretation involving perspectives radically determined by time and history. But Vattimo sees in the modesty new kinds of human freedom and possibilities for a more humane kind of individual and social life.

Vattimo’ writings on the self offer a stimulating opportunity for Christians to read St. Paul’s writings on identity and human nature with new eyes and a new point of view. We have shown that Paul has a very thick description of human existence as defined by death. Unlike Vattimo, and with him Nietzsche and Heidegger, Paul believed that our own death is not our “own most” possibility, or that the meaning of our world, or the possibility of having a world, depends on orienting toward our mortal death as the ultimate truth of our existence, as our own- most possibility. For Christians, Jesus Christ is the “own most possibility” for one’s death, and in Christ’s death is linked Christ’s resurrection and the hope of eternal life.

Rereading St. Paul’s Letters from the standpoint of Vattimo’s view of human being holds the possibility of discovering in a new way that Paul’s Christian understanding, i.e., the teachings of the New Testament are quite relevant to Postmodern thinking about the self. Indeed, without boasting, a reader could conclude that New Testament thinking about the self is really much more radical and fundamental than even that offered by Vattimo and Company.

(The Rev.) David Scott, Ph.D.

Seattle, USA and Murnau, Germany

May 2007

Davidscott1234@aol.com
Appendix 1 Plato’s View of the Self

Sources for Plato’s notion of the self are scattered throughout his Dialogues. Most important, however, is The Republic, because in that Dialogue Plato relaters the human should and human society as microcosm to macrocosm. The state is the soul writ large.

Plato taught that the center of human identity was the soul. The soul gives human nature its distinctiveness. Soul of any kind is, for Plato, a principle of movement, of self-initiating motion. Lower animals, as well as humans, have a soul, since lower animals, like humans, can move themselves at their own initiative. Even plants have a vegetative soul; they cannot move from place to place but “move” in the sense of nourishing themselves, of developing and of reproducing themselves.

The distinctive, immortal, aspect of the human soul is mind. The human mind is invisible, a spiritual substance. Yet the mind can and does interact with the body. The body, a second component of human being, is not a principle of motion, yet the body can affect or influence the soul. For example, Plato held that physical training can have a positive influence on the human soul and certain kinds of music and bad heredity can have a bad influence on the soul.31

In his Dialogue, The Republic, Plato presents the human soul as having three parts or aspects. Of course, because the mind or soul is spiritual, these “parts” do not have physical locations; they are aspects of the soul or principles or powers of the soul’s actions. One part is the rational aspect, i.e., intelligence. A second is the courageous or spirited aspect, more specifically moral courage; the third is the appetitive part, the principle of physical needs and drives. In The Republic, these three parts of the soul find their social counterparts in the philosopher king, in the military and in the merchant class. The slave class, which performs society’s manual labor represents the human body socially. These three powers or aspects of the soul form a hierarchy of value: intelligence is more valuable than moral courage, and moral courage is more valuable than the appetitive aspect of the soul.

In his Dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato presents the poetic image of the rational soul as a charioteer driving two horses. One is a good horse, the principle of moral courage, which should be an ally of human reason or mind. The second horse is unruly and difficult to control; this horse is the appetitive principle in the soul. This image illustrates Plato’s conviction that human intelligence is the noblest part of the soul and should rule the other two aspects of the soul as well as the body.

The intelligent aspect of the soul, the mind, constitutes its nobility. Indeed, Plato thought, the soul has an affinity to the divine realm and absolute truth, being, goodness and beauty. For the mind can —through strenuous training and abstraction from embodied forms of worldly things —- begin to know, contemplate and appreciate a transcendent realm of eternal Ideas or Forms. This eternal realm of Ideas is, Plato held, the ground, the eternal, unchanging source, of the being, truth and goodness of all embodied, “phenomenal” things in the world. Whatever being, truth, beauty or goodness worldly, embodied things enjoy derives from these things participating in the transcendent, eternal realm of Ideas. 32

Plato taught that the goal of human life is mindfully contemplating true being, goodness beauty and truth, i.e., the transcendent realm of Forms and Ideas. This presupposes that one “knows oneself”, i.e. one recognizes that one’s mind is the deepest and most valuable principle of one’s identity and that one cultivates the powers of the mind by seeking truth, enjoying beauty and pursuing moral goodness.. In the seventh book of The Republic, Plato presents his famous parable of the intellectual programs a man makes as he proceeds from seeing shadows on a cave wall caused by lights to moving toward the opening of the cave where he begins to see things as they truly are in the direct brightness of the sun. Thus, an authentic life is a life of discovery of one’s true dignity, and a discovery of a transcendent realm of truth, beauty and goodness present and evidenced in and through worldly things.

Two aspects of Plato’s metaphysics of human being are important for this essay. First, Plato is one of the founders, if not the most important founder, of western metaphysics. Western metaphysics concerned Being to he ascribed the foundation of truth and beauty and goodness. Premodern and Modern philosophy was reflection on Being as such, thus metaphysics. Modern philosophy, especially since the Enlightenment, culminating in the philosophy of Kant, focused on how we know beings, i.e., epistemology. Being refers in this metaphysics to what is real, and reality is defined in this metaphysics as the power of presence, effectiveness, evidence, and above all changelessness. We see how Plato identifies the most real being with the transcendent realm of eternal Ideas or Forms. These forms never change and are eternal; changelessness and immortality mark the superiority of their being. Plato, therefore, equated unchanging substances, natures and essences with being. We show in this essay how Vattimo, following Nietzsche and a view of meaning as interpretation, rejects this traditional metaphysics.

We have pointed out, further, that Plato perceives in the human soul a substance or an underlying reality that is akin to the divine and transcendent realm of immortal Ideas. The human mind has a natural affinity to this realm, and through self-knowledge, i.e., knowledge of one own rational soul, one can move spiritually and intellectually up through worldly forms toward the Eternal Forms in which they participate. Plato’s dramatically present the vision of the upward progress of the soul through worldly beauty to eternal beauty in his Dialogue, The Symposium. Knowledge is grasping the eternal essences of things for Plato. Vattimo rejects this view of human knowledge, replacing it with knowledge as a limitless process of interpretation.
Appendix 2 Aristotle’s View of the Self

One major Premodern model of human nature was that of Aristotle. The most important text for Aristotle’s thought on human nature is De Anime, Concerning the Soul. But his Metaphysics is very important for his view of the mind and knowledge. In the opening chapter of the latter work, Aristotle importantly defines true knowledge as the mind’s grasp of the causes of things. That knowing is grasping the principles or causes of things in the world is a foundation for what is meant as “foundationalism.” A common feature of Postmodern philosophy and theology is rejecting the possibility of “foundational” knowledge.

Aristotle taught a human has two components. One is a central essence. This essence confers to its underlying substance a purpose that is inherent or intrinsic to the essence. The second component of human being, according to Aristotle, is a series of peripheral accidents, associated with the body. Thus, Socrates’ essence is that of a human being, possessing a rational soul; peripheral, accidental qualities would include the physical features of Socrates’ body.

Aristotle held that the human soul had a much more intimate relation to the body than did Plato. Aristotle’s teaching is that the soul is the form of the body. That is the human soul is the body’s principle of identity; it makes the body a human body. This makes the soul the formal cause, the identity-giving ground, of each human being. The soul is also final cause of human beings, meaning that the human soul “hard wires” in human nature the purpose and goal of human being and the quality of authentic human happiness.

Aristotle taught hat the human soul has three aspects or principles. One is the vegetative which is the basis for human nutrition and reproduction. Sexual desire and basic survival needs have their ground in the vegetative aspect of the human soul. A second aspect of the soul is the sensitive, by which Aristotle meant the human basis for sense perception, for local motion, for imagination and for memory. Aristotle thought that this aspect of the soul was a natural ally for the highest and richest aspect of the human soul, human reason.

One implication of this Aristotelian understanding of human nature is that human nature is essentially the same in every individual person. That is, this pre-Modern Greek position held that essentially each of us shares one and the same human nature. Each human being is alike in having a rational soul in addition to a vegetative (driving the processes of nutrition and reproduction) and a sensitive soul (driving the processes of sensing the world beyond the embodied self.) This rational soul not only allows us to connect ideas in a contradictory-free way and to link means to ends. More importantly, the rational soul enables humans to intellectually grasp the essences of each thing in the world and to assess its inherent value, i.e., its value not just for the self but its intrinsic value in the total scheme of the world.

Another implication is that each individual person has a moral center. For Aristotle, the center of human being, the human nature, is capable of self-directed actions. This distinguishes human beings from other, “lower” natural species, such as stones, plants or the non-rational animals. As a rational being, i.e., a being with reason and will, human beings can mindfully understand the relative goodness of possible goals, assess their intrinsic value and to move itself by the will toward that value. This practical reasoning, i.e., use of the rational will in relation to choice and action, allows the human will to choose the good perceived by human reason and also to perceive the series of steps required to choose that good.

The view that human beings have a shared human nature, which has a center out of which a person is the agent of his or her own actions, is the foundation for western ethics. Because humans can act out of their own center, they have agency; having agency, they can be held responsible for what they do. Praise and blame for human actions are, therefore, appropriate. Belonging to this Pre-modern and Modern conception are also such traditional concepts as moral ends/goals/purposes; moral duties, virtues and vices and moral practices. 33

Both directions of western ethics, the deontological and the teleological approaches, assume Aristotle’s notion of humans having a moral center. Deontology is the direction of ethics giving central importance to duties and norms in the moral life. Teleological ethics focuses on outcomes of actions; the goods achieved or intended in human agency.

A key modern example of deontological ethics is Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Stated negatively Kant’s central moral principle was that no person should give himself or herself preferential treatment. Stated positively, Kant’s central moral principal was always act such that one could make the norm of one’s action a universal principal, i.e., a principle that everyone should follow. Another way Kant stated his key moral norm was, always treat a human being as an end and never merely as a means.

In contrast to Deontological ethics, teleological ethics gives priority to goals or ends of actions. The rightness or wrongness of an action is measured not so much by the norm or rule guiding it but by the outcome of the action, whether the action brings good or benefit to people’s lives, including one’s own life. John Stuart Mills is a foundational figure in modern teleological theories of ethics.

Thus, we see how Aristotle continues, although he importantly modifies, Plato’s metaphysical understanding of human being. Like Plato, Aristotle thought of human nature in terms of essence and underlying substance. The reality of human being is correlated with the rational substance or soul, and the dignity of the rational soul is related to the mind’s ability to know being, through knowledge of beings. Metaphysics, in Aristotle’s sense, is the study of being as such, and Aristotle credits the human mind with the ability to grasp the nature of being in and through knowledge of separate beings in the world, including the being of human nature.
Appendix 3: St. Augustine’s View of the Self

St. Augustine is what in theology is called an occasional theologian. Like Martin Luther, but unlike Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, St. Augustine never wrote a “systematic theology. Rather, he wrote theology in response to specific challenges and occasions. For instance, St. Augustine wrote The City of God, to defend Christianity against the charge that Christian failure to worship Rome’s civic gods contributed to the fall of Rome to Alaric in 410. For this reason, find a clear, organized teaching by St. Augustine about human nature is not easy.

Unlike Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine, like St. Thomas, taught that the whole creation, including human being, derived from an act of absolute origination by God out of nothing. This is the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. God created the world out of nothing by His own free act. Only God existed before creation; God did not produce the world out of God’s own being (as Plotinus and Neoplatonist theology taught); nor did God create the world out of some preexisting material. Therefore, every creature depends from moment to moment on God’s sustaining creative force; when God withdraws that creative support from a creature the creature dies.

St. Augustine also taught a doctrine of rationes seminales. The “rational seeds” are germs of things or potentialities that God creates and which develop into various objects and species of beings. These rationes seminales are invisible, cannot be experienced and develop into various things in the world according to a divine plan. St. Augustine taught the idea of rationes seminales as a way of interpreting the Genesis creation account that, on the one hand, God created all things together, but also that some things were created after others.

Human being is the peak of creation, for human nature consists of a material body and an immortal soul. The human soul is not eternal by nature but only by the power of God; this distinguishes Augustine’s teaching about the soul from Plato and perhaps Aristotle’s, who taught that the soul was intrinsically and by its own nature immortal.

In some places in his writing, St. Augustine speaks of human being as being a rational soul using a physical body, i.e., as the soul being a substance in its own right. This way of thinking is very Platonic. Augustine, even, unlike Plato, taught that the body couldn’t act on the soul; only the soul acts in relation to the body and perceives sensations the body caused by external things.

In other places in his writing, St. Augustine affirms that the embodied soul is one reality, not two different substances –a material substance and a spiritual substance. Nevertheless, St. Augustine tended, like Plato, to think of body and soul as different from each other; he did not think holistically as did Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom taught that the soul was the form, the activating principle of the body such that the ensouled body was definitely one reality, not two alien substances.

In any case, St. Augustine taught that the soul is an immaterial substance, that it has intelligence,(unlike the lower animals God created) and that the soul is immortal, although created by God.

Appendix 4: St. Thomas’s View of the Self

Thomas draws directly and particularly from Aristotle’s philosophy for his understanding of human nature. 34 Of course, Thomas, unlike Aristotle, believed that God created the human person from nothing and that human existence depends moment by moment on the continuing creative power of God. Further, Thomas believes that God has acted gracefully in Jesus Christ and through the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the sake of human salvation. Thus, Thomas, unlike Aristotle, believes that humans can enjoy eternal life with God by means of God’s grace. However, when Thomas describes the human nature God has created, and which God sustains, he draws directly on Aristotle.

For Thomas, as for Aristotle, the constitutive reality of human nature is the soul, which is the form or principle of identity of the body. The soul is a spiritual reality, not a material thing. The soul is something subsisting; i.e., it is the principle of its own powers and actions. However, human being cannot simply be equated with the human soul, for human beings are a composite of soul and body. The body belongs to a human being’s identity, but does so by means of the soul. Thus, as noted already, Thomas taught a closer relation between soul and body than did St. Augustine,

Like Aristotle, Thomas taught that the soul has several distinguishable powers, and following Aristotle, Thomas held that these powers are distinguishable by their specific acts and purposes (objiecta). As did Aristotle, Thomas distinguishes the intellectual, the appetitive and the vegetative powers of the soul. To the vegetative powers of the soul belong nutrition, growth and reproduction. The sensitive soul is the principle of external and internal sensation. The external senses consist of the five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. The interior senses include common sense, imagination, the capacity to create mental images; judgment about what is useful and not useful for the body; and memory.

The highest power of the soul and the basis of human dignity is the human mind or intellect. This consists of two aspects: the practical reason and the speculative reason. The latter pertains to the knowledge and assessment of the good that concerns human actions; the former pertains to the understanding of being and beings for its own sake.

The human mind has an active and a passive aspect. The passive intellect receives images of objects through the bodily senses. The active intellect abstracts the forms of these objects from the images in the passive intellect. Thus, the active intellect is a kind of form of forms, able to assume the forms of anything that it can know. So, the human mind can enrich itself with the forms of other things and thus knowing is a kind of expansion or enhancement of the self.