Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Persons appear to persons only

The stance or attitude that you or I take up in relation to an other presupposes how you or I will perceive the other.
  • If I am angrily looking for the one who threw a rock at me behind my back, I see everyone behind me as a suspect.
  • If I am looking for gold among the grains of sand, all else appears as dross.
  • If I am looking for valuable lumber in the forest, I will look past the lovely redwoods and see only the steps I need to take until the money is in the bank.
  • A starving man doesn't take time to admire how nicely the cake is decorated.
  • The boss who states a demand is not prepared to see his employee as a man entitled to a different opinion.
  • If I expect my love at the door, what a disappointment is the postman.
How we are predetermines what we see, what we experience.

Human beings bring personhood into the world. To be treated as a full person. To be loved as a person. These are things everyone wants, deserves and appreciates. It takes a full person to treat someone else as a full person. If I act from less, and cut you down, I have unpersoned myself and you may likely feel unpersoned. What a joy when persons meet as persons. And more than this, persons have the opportunity to bring a kind of personhood to all the things of the world and nature. The little red flower in my backyard, that I love, care for and admire.

To the traditional American Indian cultures, animals and plants were "'persons' worthy of respect, even affection"(1).

Only if we assume full personhood before one another and before nature - and stand not as mere consumers, producers, or workers, but as human beings, listening, wondering, questioning, speaking, loving, imagining - will nature's creatures rise up to us in their own personhood. Only when we are listening, receiving, attentive and present, can people and things appear to us in the fulness of who they are.

"When in the early 1870s the bison were slaughtered on the southern plains, the animals meant money to some and aroused pity in others. 'But for all their differences,' Richard White notes, 'those who saw animals as commodities and those who saw them as objects of sentiment stood on the same side of a cultural divide. On the other side was a world in which animals were persons and pity was the sentiment that animals felt towards humans. .... once, when animals were persons, the West was a biological republic." (2)

Notes:

Both quoted in Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality (1999): (1) J. Baird Callicott, "Traditional American Indian and Western European Attitudes toward Nature: An Overview," Environmental Ethics 4 (1982): 317.
(2) Richard White, "Animals and Enterprise," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner et al. (NY: Oxford UP, 1994): 236.