Person Means Relation
By David Walsh.
St. Augustine’s Press, 2024.
Paperback, 110 pages, $16.
Reviewed by Robert Grant Price.
Those familiar with the writing of personalist philosopher David Walsh know that he’s densely aphoristic. Large tracts of his works, notably Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (2015) and The Priority of the Person (2020), read like Catholic Zen poetry. Understanding is bound and lost and recovered in the language. Consider these puzzles from Politics of the Person:
To be a person is to know what it means to be a person.”
“Persons stand outside of being.”
“Self-expression occurs only through the medium of that which is not the self.”
“We cannot define the other for we are already defined by him or her.”
Walsh has a habit of stacking these dense, declarative sentences one on top of the other for page after page to produce an impenetrable fortress. If you’re inside, it’s wonderful. If you’re outside, bring a blanket because it’s cold. Walsh’s is not light reading, not only because of the intensity of his prose but the depth of the arguments he makes.
This is the case with Person Means Relation, too, but less so. Person Means Relation reproduces Walsh’s 2023 University of Dallas Aquinas Lecture. Included in this little book are a response by Matthew Walz and a reply. Walz, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, notes the pithiness of Walsh’s language in his response. He uses a good portion of his essay to quote his favorite maxims:
The difficulty that he and we have is that we lack a means of visualizing what it means to be the kind of being that gives its being away.”
“The only way that person can be known is personally. Over and above all that is said and done there is the person who is over and above all that is said and done.”
“The substance that can give its substance away has long departed from the world for which survival at any cost is the measure.”
The extreme economy of Walsh’s phrasings shouldn’t dissuade curious readers, especially from Person Means Relation, a lecture that functions as a primer to Walsh’s earlier books.
Walsh, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, begins his lecture by tracing the idea of the person from Socrates and Aristotle through Boethius to St. Thomas and Kant. He focuses his attention on Thomas, whose understanding of the person gives the lecture its title—person means relation, a line that appears in Question 29 of the first part of the Summa.
Walsh’s little book begins with a study of persons as Thomas developed it. Thomas concerned himself with understanding the divine persons of the Trinity. Yet, as Walsh explains, the saint never took this concept down from the heavens and applied it to human persons. Why Thomas never brought this thinking to earth relates to inwardness—or the lack of a comprehension of inwardness that existed for philosophers at the time Thomas was writing. The idea that we each have an inside, an inward space, an internal world, a personal universe inside ourselves, came later along the trajectory of philosophy. But this idea has proved essential to knowing what the person is.
The person, Walsh argues, exists beyond substance. This is a problem of language as much as it is a problem of philosophical barnacles that have collected around the word over the centuries. Words set like super glue. Substance is set in the idea of persons. Boethius helped lodge this idea in the collective mind when he defined persons as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” When I say, “think of a person,” and you imagine your mother, the bus driver, the shaggy, blurry person who looks back from the mirror each morning. Person is in that body, is it not?
Yet person is more than that, and Person Means Relation attempts “to find a more adequate way of speaking [about the person] that saves us from defaulting to the language of things.” The inwardness particular to the human person is not a thing. Inwardness cannot be touched. It cannot be captured in a glass jar like a glow of fireflies. “Someone,” Walsh teaches, “is utterly different from something.” “The language of substance must be replaced by the language of relation.”
Walsh takes his lecture forward to Kant to consider how the person relates to history and how two people, two inwardnesses, can know each other. Person is “understood as a holding of the other inwardly.” Only the person can express self-determination. “Holding existence in our own hands we become capable of giving ourselves to others and receiving others within us.”
All the while, Walsh reflects on the nature of God. Person is a Christian concept—“Person is the reality of God”—and any attempt to understand the person must transit back to God, who to the Christian is a unity of three persons. Walsh’s meditations on the deep meaning of the person, in his earlier books and in this short lecture, shows that deepness to be deeper than thought.
To try to explain any more about Person Means Relation will only reveal the shallowness of this reviewer’s comprehension or flatten Walsh’s thinking into something it isn’t. Philosophy, like Zen poetry, like jokes, loses something when you try to explain what they mean. It’s better to hear it for yourself.
Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.
As presaged in science fiction novels for decades, the question of when AI becomes a person is finally demanding a serious answer. The AI we have on our desktops do not think or reason. They don’t dream or come up with original ideas. Not yet at least, and maybe never. The insistence of the questions increase as technologists improve their machines. Are AI already thinking beings? Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton thinks so. Can a person be in relation with an intelligent machine? Is there a new Turing test available to determine if, and when, AI qualifies for personhood? Can it ever? If AI can become a person, what does that mean for the human person?
These are not questions that Walsh takes up in this short lecture. But his work provides a way to approach these pressing and fascinating problems.
Robert Grant Price is a university teacher and communications consultant.
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