The Person as Subject

hello everyone for this lesson we are going to look at uh voa's longer article in here called uh the person subject and community and in this one uh we've been talking so far about the person as an individual and looking at the um individual personal structures focusing on the self but here we're going to shift gears a little bit to transitioning from this understanding of the individual person onto the understanding of the other and uh this is going to have ramifications for both ethics and political philosophy so in so far as uh vo was going

to address ethics that will have to do with the reflection back onto the individual and how does the individual person within the community live a good life um and for the political it's going to focus on the common good of course so uh what he's going to do here will provide essentially the principles for both looking at ethics and political philosophy and now this uh contemporary context as influenced by personalism but expanding on that tomisic base as we've been talking about so far so uh let's start with the experience of the individual human person there

are a couple of quotes that I want to start with here uh the first one that I have marked out is on page 2021 this is kind of in the middle of the page here the experience of existing and acting is something that all human beings both others and I have in common at the same time all human beings both others and I are also the object of this experience this occurs in different ways because I experience my own self as existing and acting differently from how I experience others and so does every other concrete

self and a little bit further down when I construct an image of the person as subject on the basis of the experience of the human being I draw especially upon the experience of my own self but never in isolation from or in opposition to others so uh I think there's an interesting parallel here between what we discussed already also with meritan so in so far as maritan talks about knowledge by connaturality which is this experience of self it's not so much a scientific deductive knowledge as opposed to just knowledge by way of inclination and it's

because you you are that thing and as you experience yourself in act that's how you you know yourself so it's not like you know yourself abstractly but you know yourself in um this kind of immediate sense as you you are yourself now in that experience now taking it to VOA so VOA is going to think about that in terms of how we know our personal structure what it means to be a human person so those are things that we're going to know upon reflection of of ourselves and our own experience of ourselves Now by that

same token though there is an aspect of our experience that we realize that we're in community we're we're existing in community surrounded by other eyes so to speak we have this sense that other human persons share in our nature and that it's not simply let's say like a a look at nature in the classical sense where we understand others as rational animals right now looking Beyond this from a personalist lens we also understand them as persons but we understand that by virtue of our understanding of ourselves so as we think about our own internal Dynamics

and our own personal structures the way that we live the way that we experience the world our subjectivity and so forth we are going to project that onto others and understand then that while we don't see it in the way that we see ourselves right we have access to our own uh our own mind in a way that others do not but likewise the same is true for the other person so for the other person they also each have their own individual structures of Personality just as we have with ourselves and so just as we

have our own minds so too do they have theirs so too do they have their own kind of central vantage point of existence the way that we do right so we know ourselves as the center of of this kind of subjective Universe centered on ourselves from our vantage point but likewise uh other people as another self as another human person will have that same kind of dynamism and that same kind of structure within them so for each of us and each of them uh we the individual the individual person know that all of us have

that kind of individual centered vantage point from the personalist standpoint right so for each of us um we all perceive reality in that way as a human person we all interact with each other from that kind of vantage point with our own private minds and uh so likewise we understand that just as my own thoughts are inaccessible let's say to the other person without me communicating them although even then we know that uh as we communicate our own thoughts uh we are essentially materializing or trying to immanentize something that isn't really material in itself so

there's only so much that we can do with that it's always going to be uh a kind of imperfect transfer but nonetheless um as we try to communicate our thoughts to others others will do the same for us so others can't see inside my mind but on that same token I can't see inside theirs and the only thing that we can do to bridge that Gap is to make this choice of will to share of ourselves with the other person so that's the reflection back we started already talking about in the the last lessons more

about the individual or the human person in the abstract but now again based on that we can infer those same things onto the other which which is already built into the cake too that that there's that recognition of the other person as another self within the human species and uh in that same frame of personality so uh that's going to be the Principal starting point of Ethics along these kind of tistic personalist lines that he's talking about now here's another thing on that note uh before moving on he talks about being an object of experience

so so interestingly we experience ourselves as an object we don't fully exhaust ourselves we saw this with meritan right that only God has this kind of full knowledge of us in perfection even we who are ourselves um don't have that kind of perfect knowledge there's more that we can discover about ourselves as a human being and uh but as we experience ourselves as we take ourselves as this object of experience well interestingly enough when we look at the other person right they become in a sense an object of experience for us and that also is

true the other way around so it's easy for us to think about how we see the other person in our head but the realization now that we've talked about the other person as as another eye another self we turn that on its head and we realize well these people these other people the person looking at me in conversation they have their own mind they have their own personality and just as when I look at them right being my own let's a vantage point my own Center I'm making them an object or I'm receiving them as

an object of my experience so to am I then received as an object of experience for the other person and so that's the other realization of Ethics too that then will lead into the principles of Politics as well but uh this sense that just as I experience others I myself am received am experienced by others uh and I don't know how I'm experienced by others I can you know infer a couple of things but uh my only way of knowing what others think of me or how others experience me is for me to ask another

right for them to share with me how I'm appearing to them and so on so this is just bouncing back and forth between the I and the other okay the other as another I all right now uh moving on to page 222 there's a little thing I have marked out here at the top of the page as soon as we begin to accept the notion of pure Consciousness or the pure subject we abandon the very basis of the objectivity of experience that allows us to understand and explain the subjectivity of the human being in a

complete way but then we are no longer interpreting the real subjectivity of the human being so this of course is in critique of the modern methods of philosophy that talk about you can think about this with Kant with deart you know these Notions of pure ideas uh pure Consciousness the pure self where you can somehow kind of slice away something from reality and consider it by itself in isolation from everything else and uh of course the aristot Alan intim mistic response to this will be that you're not going to be able to do that because

all of these things are united such in reality that if you were to separate them like that uh you would lose the whole thing so the whole is more than just to some of these parts and if you try to isolate the self and think about pure Consciousness you're you're not going to be left with with anything essentially as far as a human being is concerned that all of these things uh are united in in reality we can make conceptual differences between the parts and conceptual abstractions but um you can't understand them without reference to

these other parts as well and so I think this is what VOA is picking up on and trying to get back into and and I think with what we were talking about with hurl and shayer I think that in their critiques of Kant for example um I think there's that same inclination at least that recognition that um there's a hole of reality there that we can't separate now I think that uh with HL and the EPO um he gets us a little bit he he's maybe a little less uh worried about making that separation than

perhaps somebody like uh Aristotle and Thomas said I think would be more hesitant um but nevertheless I think even with hurl as we talked about before I don't think that you lose a sense of that that hold that there's um this recognition that uh subjectivity doesn't exist in this kind of vacuum it doesn't exist without this kind of reference to the other but that this is something that's baked into the cake and so likewise with phenomenology um in our experience of the phenomena you can't understand this kind of experience without that uh necessary link with

reality and and this intimate contact with the real things in themselves so that's what I think he's getting at in that brief point to start out with all right all right now uh speaking of which there's a long passage here on 226 that I think rounds us out pretty nicely and takes us back to what we were talking about before with phenomenology and uh I I think before um we saw this of course through Sakowski but it'll be uh interesting now at least to see uh in voa's own words how he would talk about who

in the Epic and this kind of defensive phenomenology so this is in the middle of 226 well it may be granted that the person and action or to put it another way my own existing and acting self is constituted in Consciousness to the extent that Consciousness always reflects the existence or essay and activity op parari of that self still the experience of the human being and especially the experience of my own self clearly reveals that Consciousness is always subjectified in the self and that its roots are always the suppositum umum Consciousness is not an independent

subject although by means of a certain abstraction or rather exclusion which in huran terminology is called Epoch Consciousness could be treated as though it were a subject this way of treating Consciousness forms the basis of all transcendental philosophy which investigates acts of cognition as intentional acts of Consciousness that is as acts directed toward extra subjective objective contents or phenomena as long as this type of anal of analysis of Consciousness retains the character of a cognitive method it can and does bear excellent fruit and yet because this method is based on the exclusion or Epoch of

Consciousness from reality from really existing being it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of that reality and it certainly cannot be regarded as a philosophy of the human being the human person at the same time however there can be no doubt that this method should be used extensively in the philosophy of the human being Consciousness is not an independent subject but it does play a key role in understanding the personal subjectivity of the human being this is an interesting distinction and uh again I think that this links very well with what we were discussing already

with Sakowski and his defense of phenomenology from the Catholic philosopher standpoint and uh the distinction of course is that I think with the Epic um if we approach this as a a method a kind of way of um seeing more about the human person as opposed to mistaking it for that is mistaking phenomenal ology for a kind of new metaphysics of the human person or philosophy of being then that's where we can have this kind of harmony with realism in the big picture and perhaps those uh phenomenologists that would take uh hur's philosophy and this

philosophy in general as a step away from realism uh are not making that move so they are taking uh they're reducing philosophy let's say just to that method such that um there's no there's nothing further than that and so then like other modern philosophical systems you're kind of tunneled into uh this slice of it and in that way you would then lose the philosophy of being and the philosophy of the human person that way he was talking about um but you don't have to do that of course and it doesn't seem that huro would have

us do that either okay so uh for this first part um before moving on into the uh talk of the community um we're going to talk in the next video about the principles and of Ethics uh as far as the relation of the good and so this is something that we'll see in contrast with uh with chaylor especially and then after that we'll kind we'll move then into um the political good