THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR METAPHYSICS

STUDIES IN METAPHYSICS, VOLUME II

PERSON AND SOCIETY

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR METAPHYSICS

This volume is dedicated to Prof. H.D. Lewis, the first President of The International Society for Metaphysics. His open vision and creative spirit enabled the Society rapidly to undertake the coordinated program of research in metaphysics throughout the world of which this series is the fruit.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to The University of Hawaii Press, for permission to reprint Masao Abe, "The Problem of Evil in Christianity and Buddhism," from Paul O. Ingram and Frederick J. Streng, eds., Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Mutual Renewal and Transformation (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, l986), pp. 139-154.

Introduction

PART I. THE PERSON AS SOCIAL

1. Person and Community, Individual and Society,

Reformation and Revolution

by Richard McKeon 3-16

2. Confucius, Aristotle, and Contemporary Revolutions

by Ellen Chen 17-27

3. Person, Personality and Environment

by Peter A. Bertocci 29-38

4. Individual and Society in Metapysical Perspective

by Ivor Leclerc 39-48

5. Self-Awareness and Ulitimate Selfhood

by Seyyed Hossein Nasr 49-57

6. Buddhism and the Way of Negation

by Toshimitsu Hasumi 59-61

PART II. SOCIETY AND THE PERSON

7. The Development of Community

by Robert O. Johann 65-75

8. Community in the Process of Development

by Mieczyslaw Gogacz 77-79

9. Person as a Unique Universal Social Being

by Mihailo Markovic 81-89

10. Homo Creator: Solving the Problem of Human

Existence

by Janusz Kuczynski 91-99

11. The Extension of Human Rights and the

Advancement of Society

by Augustin Basave Fernandez del Valle 101-108

Comment by Abraham Edel 109-113

12. The Role of Reason and Its Technologies in

the Life of Society

by Alwin Diemer 115-123

13. The Problem of Evil in Christianity and

Buddhism

by Masao Abe 125-142

Index 143-145

It has been the triumph as well as the agony of the 20th Century to have come to a newly developed sense of the person. This has implied in social relations both creative liberation and destructive oppression. It is the task of metaphysics as described by Aristotle to know the good or the end toward which human striving should be directed. Hence, after its study on Person and Nature,¹ The International Society for Metaphysics has carried out this study on Person and Society. A third, correlated study on Person and God² follows.

By seeing social crises as the classical problem of the one and the many in contemporary terms, the study searches for ways to deepen the understanding of the person, not in opposition to society, but precisely within it and in terms of it. On this basis it seeks to evolve a deeper and more adequate metaphysical understanding of the nature of society and of its implications for the development of contemporary social life in its legal structures and technological implementation.

The study draws upon the resources and the experiences of the world's many cultures. Part I works out a more adequate notion of the person for contemporary life by looking for new insights in the psychology of the person and the dialectical tensions within society. It then develops a metaphysics of the person as social in terms of the various Eastern and Western horizons whether as transcendent or as the ground of being.

Part II concerns the person in society, focusing upon the nature of the person in relation to the development of community and social praxis. It draws conclusions regarding human rights, appropriate applications of the burgeoning technological capabilities and the problem of evil.

Upon completion of these studies on the person, the International Society for Metaphysics undertook a series of investigations regarding society, in terms of unity, truth and justice, and the good. Further, having studied intensively both person and society it extended the investigation to the field of culture and cultural heritage understood as personal creativity in community and in history. In this manner the work of the ISM has constituted a cohesive and coordinated investigation of metaphysics as a living discipline in our day.

1. George F. McLean, ed. (Washington: University Press of America and The International Society for Metaphysics, l988).

2. George F. McLean and Hugo Meynell, eds. (Washington: University Press of America and The International Society for Metaphysics, l988).

CHAPTER I

Person and Community,

Individual and Society,

Reformation and Revolution

RICHARD McKEON

Inquiries concerning the nature of man and society and programs of action bearing on their formation and change have undergone reformations and revolutions which parallel in sequence and purpose contemporaneous revolts against metaphysics and projections of architectonic substitutes. Again and again, the apparently endless proliferation of warring theories about being and the nature of things and of occurrences has led philosophers to abandon metaphysics in order to investigate how we know, hopeful that knowledge of mind and knowing might enable them to establish principles and uncover methods of knowing being and what is. When their epistemic investigations, in turn, have travelled many paths into many regions of thought and feeling, it has seemed plausible, again and again, that examination of what we say and do might provide a key to meanings and references and to beings and existences.

Such revolutions have marked off the turns of the ages since the ancient Greeks laid down the pattern and established the vocabulary of culture and philosophy in the West. Inquiry concerning truly fundamental questions of being and existence, thought and feeling, action and expression faces, as a consequence, the need to make initial and usually unexamined choices which determine the statement and the examination of the questions. The choice of semantic and substantive presuppositions may be schematized in two dimensions. Perpendicularly, one might choose to begin with beings or with existences, with ideas or with experiences, with symbols or with actions. Horizontally one might ground one's choices in metaphysical principles of things, or in epistemological methods of critical judgment, or in analytical interpretations of statements or processes.

Aristotle made a characteristic contribution to the construction of this variable matrix of symbols and significances. He formed a vocabulary of univocal scientific and philosophic terms by giving words in ordinary usage strict definitions and by inventing technical terms or terms of art to transform the original ambiguity of words into a dynamic structure of interrelated terms and meanings. This vocabulary of univocal words entered into the languages of philosophy, science, and policy in the West. But its terms seldom retained the meaning by which Aristotle defined them or the applications with which he used them, and progress or even simple changes in all fields were often announced and developed accompanied either by citation or by refutation of Aristotle. Changing interpretations of Aristotle are among the significant characteristics by which successive ages in the West may be interpreted.

Perpendicularly Aristotle opted for self-sufficient subtances, self-evident first principles, and natural potentialities and action. Horizontally he formulated an architectonic theoretical science of being and of first principles, an architectonic practical science of political and moral actions, and a productive science which might be put to architectonic uses to order processes and products of artistic and mechanical making. Aristotle's theoretic science of being, which came to be called metaphysics, related the sciences--theoretic, practical, and productive--and the arts--particular and universal--by their first principles or their commonplaces. But in the inquiries and analyses of his followers and opponents it ceased to be a science; it became a belief about being and reality and principles, formulated and reformulated in antagonistic idealisms and materialisms and disavowed and refuted in a variety of skepticisms.

The forms which arts, sciences, and culture take are determined by the circumstances, times, and communities in which they arise and develop. Aristotle's practical science of politics is a single science of human action, individual and social, treated in two parts: from the perspective of the grounds of individual moral action in the Ethics and from the perspective of the grounds of political organization in the Politics. Its purpose was practical: to lead men to perform good actions, not theoretic, to discover and demonstrate the final good. In the inquiries and analyses of his followers and opponents, it ceased to be a practical: science and became a theoretical science of the good, or a physico-biological science of nature, and human nature, or a rhetorical art of inducing actions, good or bad. Aristotle's productive science of poetics can be given an architectonic function, since the statement of what is thought to be and the formation of human associations and communities may be treated as products of arts of making or artificial objects. But from the beginning his followers and opponents turned, from poetic science and the investigation of form and matter in art objects, to the rhetorical art of using words to produce effects in feeling, conviction, and action.

This is still the vocabulary of discussion and the strategy of action. We tend to begin with the vocabulary in which questions are formulated and to dispute concerning significances and applications. We use rhetorical arts to secure agreement in the reformation and revolution of statements of questions and of principles, and in the establishment of communications and of communities. We seek to be objective by beginning with what men say and do rather than with presupposed things grounded in nature or with alleged facts grounded in knowledge. We expect natural things and warranted knowledge to emerge from the reinforcement or resolution of claims of individuals and groups in opposition.

Nature is a product not a principle; the examination of man and society as disclosed by what they say and do can take over the functions once exercised by metaphysics in determining the nature of things and the principles of knowledge, morals, and policy. Men are still formed by the communities in which they are reared, and these are still formed by the men who constitute them and live in them. Justice and equality are still sought in the relations of man and society, and in the relations of men to men and of societies to societies. The meanings of `nature' have changed, however, and nature operates differently in processes and in explanations. It is no longer used as a principle to establish the `nature' of man and society and of justice and equality in their interrelations. Instead the nature of rights and duties, and of man and society in general, are derived as products and sequences of what men say, and do, and make.

From the beginning of Western philosophical speculation, two theories of the relations of men and society have developed in opposition and in mutual adjustment. Plato analogized man and society; the virtues of man can be discovered writ large in the state. They form a single mutually defining whole or a single virtue. The associations and communities of men differ only in size, not in nature. Aristotle made univocal distinctions between the virtues of men and the institutions of societies. He sought a basis for discovering and investigating the `nature' of man in the nature of his faculties and in their natural functions and habituations. The `nature' of the associations of men form a hierarchy from the household, the simplest community required for mere living, to the state, the inclusive community required for living well. The virtues of man, based on his nature, provide him a second nature. The institutions of states, based on natural relations of men and things, constitute a nature prior to the nature of individual men, which orders the relations of ruling and being ruled. Justice is a virtue in individuals, an order in states, and a bond between individuals and states.

Aristotle begins his Politics with a refutation of the theory that human associations differ only in size and in the number of their members. This is a preliminary to formulating the theory that their differences are found in the nature and function of their ruler and ruled in ordered sequence from simple autonomous to inclusive free community. Aristotle based the simplest community on two natural relationships, the generation of the immediate family on male and female, the formation of the economy or household on master and slave. Two further relationships arise with products of these relations, father and son, and owner and property.

The relation of male and female in the generation of children is a relation of two rational beings. Aristotle likens it therefore to `constitutional' rule, that is, to the true form of the rule of many called by the very name of `polity' or `constitution', as contrasted to the degraded form called `democracy.' The relation of father and son in the education of the young is a relation in which unformed rational potentialities are formed and developed; it is likened therefore to `royal' rule. The relation of master to slave in the formation and operation of the household economy is a productive relationship in which the workers lack by nature the power to make decisions concerning their own welfare and that of the community. Thus, it is likened to `despotic' rule. The relation of owner to property is a relation between man and the things he makes; it operates therefore in production and use. In the household slaves are animate instruments of action, while property consists of products and inanimate instruments of production.

Aristotle's formulation of the natural relations which underlie the family and the more inclusive communities, the village and the state--into which it enters as an element and from which it derives its most characteristic social functions--are the source of four doctrines attributed to Aristotle and almost unanimously condemned as egregious Aristotelian errors: a conception of property, of slavery, of youth, and of women. They are all errors concerning the `nature' of men in social relations. They are misinterpretations of Aristotle, for they neglect the distinction between the meanings Aristotle gave to `nature' in practical and in theoretic sciences. Nevertheless as widely accepted interpretations, they take on characteristic forms in successive ages and make his distinctions available to frame new interpretations of man and society, science and knowledge, and action and statement.

Property

Aristotle differentiated the political order from the economic order; he made economic self-sufficiency of the household a prerequisite to the political organization of the state; and he subordinated economic to political objectives. Politics became inseparable from economics in political economy, and political theory and history were given new economic forms. They came to be seen as theories of property and production--or of the freedom and rights of men--and as histories of the development and interactions of cultures--of the generation of communities and their acquisition of power.

With these changes in economics and in its relation to politics Aristotle's conception of the nature of property and of production became egregious errors, but they provided the vocabulary for their own correction. Like Plato, Aristotle recognized that existing Greek cities were in reality two cities rather than one: a city of the rich and a city of the poor. Therefore he changed his definition of democracy from the rule of the many to the rule of the poor. Moreover, he maintained that of all possible constitutions only two actually existed, usually in mixture, oligarchy and democracy. These balanced and opposed the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of freedom as ends of the state. He separated questions of ownership, production, and use of property. He argued for private as opposed to common ownership, and he sought criteria and limits of production in use. The determinant role of use and consumption in the household led him to distinguish the economic order of the family from the political order of the state. He differentiated property which is an instrument of production from wealth which is accumulated and used for exchange but not for further production. This distinction earned him repeated criticism and refutation for failure to understand the productivity of capital and the justification of interest.

Locke began his Second Treatise on Civil Government by distinguishing the power of magistrates over subjects, fathers over children, master over servants, husbands over wives, and lords over slaves. This was in refutation of Filmer's reduction of the commonwealth to the family in his Partrarcha or the Natural Power of Kings. In this Locke was similar to Aristotle who had begun his work on Politics by distinguishing the rules of statesmen, kings, householders, and masters in refutation of Plato's reduction of the republic to the family. Where Locke sought the foundations for society in natural powers, Aristotle sought them in natural relations. Aristotle's refutation of the reduction of the state to the family was for the purpose of distinguishing politics from economics. Locke's refutation of that reduction permitted him to assign the name `property' to "the mutual preservation of lives, liberties, and estates" and to make the enjoyment of property the end of civil government.

Modern political revolutions have been economic revolutions, conflicts of rich and poor, haves and have-nots. Resolution has been sought in common ownership of the means of production as a stage to the disappearance of politics and the withering away of law and the state. Resolution has been sought also in private ownership of the products of one's labor as a stage to the extension of rights from the economic to the social and cultural and the withering away of divisive nationalisms in the community of mankind. In the one, dispossessing the dispossessor is the road to freedom and well-being; in the other, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness became a synonym for life, liberty, and property. Among nations, have-not nations came into existence liberated from imperialisms and colonialisms, and seeking to form a third world independent of the worlds of communism and of capitalism. Within nations, have-not groups, minorities and majorities, took form to vindicate their economic, civic, social, and cultural rights.

Aristotle's natural relations have ceased to be generative principles of interdependent societies. But they have reappeared as principles of opposition in existing men and emerging societies, whose clashing purposes and claims may lead to the formation of equal and just societies and men. The rejection of Aristotle's argument that wealth is not productive is usually on the grounds that he confused economic with biological productivity. It is seldom remarked that the argument depends on the sense which `nature' takes on in a practical science there the nature of a political association orders and relates the activities of men and communities that function within it. Its nature defines and delimits the pursuit and accumulation of wealth lest unlimited accumulation take precedence over all other social ends and activities and transform the political community.

Slavery

Aristotle's exposition of the natural relation of master and slave is the source of the attribution to him of a doctrine no less offensive to modern sensibilities and repugnant to accepted opinions than his condemnation of the art of money-making. It is chrematistike, the doctrine that some men are by nature slaves. We have since learned that all men are by nature equal, but in making that discovery we have abandoned again Aristotle's distinction between a practical and a theoretic, a political and a psychological, sense of `nature.' In the controversy between those who think slavery is natural and those who think it is contrary to nature, Aristotle chooses his position by expounding the nature of the rule of master over slave, rather than the individual nature of the slave or the particular science of the master. For the production and use of property in the household or the economy, instruments of two kinds are needed: inanimate instruments of production or make and animate instruments of action or doing; that is, tools and materials that are used and workers who use instruments in production according to the directions of a master craftsman or architecton who relates making to doing. The rule of master over slaves has two aspects. One is an economic aspect, which leads us to recognize the continued existence of "wage-slaves" even after the abolition of slavery: the other is a social aspect, which leads us to recognize that in actual social situations there are many slaves who lack the power to make fundamental decisions bearing on their own welfare or that of the community of which they are members. Communities of the unprivileged are formed on the model or as instances of communities of the dispossessed.

The vocabulary of natural relations in ruling and being ruled supplies the distinctions of kinds of suppression in discriminations based on race, nation, religion, age, sex, or any other association or co-existence. The change is from natural generative relations to antagonistic oppositions in which the victims of discrimination struggle to achieve equality of individuals, of groups, and of nations. Paradoxically the achievement of equality of men and of societies requires two steps. First, the underprivileged group must be integrated into a group with recognized unity and dignity. Secondly, liberated and established groups must be reintegrated in the just and equal functioning of more inclusive associations and nations in a world community. In the first step integration and dignity are sometimes sought by `demonstration,' not in the sense of proving utility or worth, but in the sense of exhibiting and calling attention to injustice and inequality. In the second step desegregation and community are sometimes sought by assigning "quotas" according to the number of the disfavored group, without consideration of the abilities and functions required for the successful operation of the larger inclusive group. Indeed, demonstrations at conventions, legislatures, administrative bodies, or international organizations may be for the purpose of impeding their operation. Active participation with other groups may be for the purpose of changing the functions, the membership, or the constitution of the inclusive body.

The operation of the societies of men depends at once on mutual trust and antagonistic opposition. If one distinguishes the political and the moral, the collective and the individual, senses of `nature', some men are by nature slaves in the societies in which they function, but all men are by nature free and equal in their individual integrity and activities. On the other hand, if the political and social natures of associations are reduced to and derived from the physical, biological, and psychological natures of individual men, all men are equal. This equality is not in their powers and abilities, but in the rights and freedoms, which they realize in societies. These include: to live, to satisfy their needs and wants, to form and take care of families, to participate in other associations, to think and to express their thoughts and feelings, and to share in the economic and cultural, technological and scientific achievements of society.

Youth

Aristotle used the natural relation of father to son for the formative education of the young for participation in household and in other communities. This was transformed and inverted to add a cultural antagonism of old and young to the economic antagonism of rich and poor, and the social antagonism of privileged and repressed. Paideia means both education and culture, both a process and a product, individual and social. The education of a man in a society is to acquire a comprehension of the knowledge available and an appreciation of the values esteemed in the society. Cultures endure and change. The culture of an age of innovation or of revolution is found, not in a body of knowledge and a canon of commitments, but in attitudes and abilities which enable men to use what is know to investigate what is unknown, to turn from representations to presentations. Tradition and revolution are natural constituents in any human association. But society sometimes functions as a cohesive whole in which different cultural conceptions and aspirations are adjusted to each other and influence each other. At times revived, reviewed, or newly imagined cultures function to reorder society and to reform man.

The revolt of the young has been generalized from a revolt against parents to a revolt against established forms of education and all establishments. From a revolt of children against their father, as it was in the family as Aristotle treated it, it became the revolt of the generation gap, as it was in the family made into state in the Republic of Plato. It became the revolt of young societies, young states, young ideas, arts, sciences, philosophies, religions, modes of production, and policies of action. If education in its broadened sense of culture is not the transmission of the known and the accustomed, but the formation of arts and abilities to go beyond them, the young are clearly right in their criticism of the establishment. The accustomed answer to their criticisms, that they do not yet have the education requisite to judge what they are taught or to propose changes or improvements is inapposite, since such knowledge does not exist in the minds of either young or old and depends on instituting new cultural institutions and designing new modes of education.

Women

Aristotle's use of the natural relation of male and female for the generation of children and the formation of the family is the source of a doctrine, attributed to him, of the natural inferiority of women. Here, as in the other natural relations, Aristotle distinguishes between the sense of `nature' proper to theoretic sciences like physics, biology, and psychology, and the sense of `nature' proper to practical sciences like politics and ethics. In biology male and female are members of the same species, and they do not differ in any of the biological functions investigated except generation. The terms `male' and `female' occur only in the On the Generation of Animals as the two principles operating in all generations as form and matter in the semen and the catemenia. In order to emphasize the continuity and the difference of the functions, Aristotle says that in the operation of those principles the female is an immature or an impotent male. His interpreters, favorable and unfavorable, generalize such statements to make them apply to all functions, biological, psychological, and social, of male and female. In the controversies of the time, Aristotle did not derive the offspring from the sperm of the father, and he did not attribute a kind of sperm to the mother. He was an epigenecist, and held that the embryo arises from a series of successive differentiations from a simple homogeneous mass, anticipating in all its essential features the doctrine of Harvey.

The natural relation of male and female in the Politics is a relation of rule. It is a "constitutional" or "political" rule in which ruler and ruled both participate in ruling and contribute to the generation of the family. In this the male differs from female in providing the initiation of the process of formation. In the Nichomachean Ethics there is no differentiation of male and female virtues, but in the Politics the differentiation of functions provides a basis for distinguishing the virtues of a mother from the virtues of the father. When political natural relations are reduced to individual natural powers and functions, women are constituted a deprived group or species, alienated economically, enslaved socially, and curtailed culturally.

The vocabulary of natural relations was formed by Aristotle to provide principles for the action of man and society in the context of nature and the cosmos. This has been transformed in meaning and inverted in application to a vocabulary of existential situations in which men form antagonistic groups which seek in actions and statements to liberate men and to form just societies. The vocabulary of universal natural relations which are generative of moral man and civil society has become a vocabulary of particular natural rights to be acquired by constituting societies in which the aspirations of men are realized. Natural relations are univocally distinct; natural rights are ambiguously intermingled and analogically interdependent.

Economic rights extend beyond production and consumption for the satisfaction of material needs and felt wants based on economic relations of ownership and property. They include participation in and enjoyment of, whatever has been made or done by man in society that might contribute to a fuller life and even, in turn, protection of nature and the cosmos for the continuation of life and the advancement of well-being and happiness. Social rights extend beyond freedom of action and cooperation based on social relations of workers and supervisors of work. They include decision-making in general, not only concerning one's own actions and those of others, but also concerning beliefs and values, facts to be accepted and the knowledge to be credited. Freedom of choice (the combination of feeling and knowledge in desiderative reason or rational desire) is transformed from a freedom to do as one should in accordance with the order of society, to a freedom to do as one pleases to achieve individual satisfaction in a community based on mutual confidence, in cooperation with other communities moving to a world-community of free and equal men.

Cultural rights extend beyond education and cultivation of what is known and what is valued based on cultural relations of old and young, teacher and learner, establishments and processes of formation. They begin to include as well the development and transmission of arts and disciplines designed to use the known as a basis for inquiry into the unknown, and what is perceived and experienced as a basis for discernment of the previously unperceived and intuition of the previously unfelt and unappreciated. They spread, diversify, and deepen culture into a plurality of cultures and societies which is the community and culture of mankind. Political rights extend beyond legislative and judicial institutions for the formation and rectification of economies, societies, and states based on political relations of ruler and ruled grounded in erotic loves and concupiscences. They begin to include other forms of love and attachment, including charity (agape) between God and man, and friendship (philia) between equals who share without distinction of mine and thine. They embrace a world-state which will control and prevent conflicting appeals to force, and recourse to war, as well as a stateless world-society without need for domination and law.

The natural relations of men, in a word, provide distinct principles for the generation and continuation of the family and for the formation and operation of the household on which other associations and communities are based. The natural rights of men, on the other hand, are formulated in universal bills of human rights, which overlap as expressions of the single right to live, claimed by existing men and societies of men. They set forth and differentiate rights as objectives to be sought in the development of man and of society and of the relations between them.

Aristotle made ethics and politics parts of a single science of politics, but he carefully distinguished between the scientific treatment of the virtues of man and the institutions of the state. He did not reduce ethics to politics or politics to ethics. The intricate vocabulary in which he made these distinctions has been used to transform virtues into duties in systems of moral laws, and to direct political actions to moral ends ordered in a hierarchy of priorities established by the principles of moral virtue. In the portion of the science of politics concerned with communities, Aristotle distinguished economics from politics by basing the family and the household on natural relations of men. He treated the more inclusive communities based on them as `natures' prior to and determinative of the natures of individual men in themselves and in relation to each other. In like fashion, in the portion of political science concerned with the actions of individual men, he sought grounds for the examination and organization of the virtues of man in the nature and operation of his psychological faculties and by treating the virtues which constitute the characters of men as their `second natures.'

The faculties of man provide two basic distinctions for the scientific examination of moral action. The first is the distinction between faculties which are, and those which are not, subject to habituation, since virtues are habits formed by actions such as they in turn produce. The second is the distinction between the irrational faculties which share in rational principles which form moral virtues and character, and rational faculties which have a rational principle and contribute to the formation of moral virtues.

Moral virtues have two interdependent characteristics. One is that they are determined relative to the passions and actions of individual men; the other is that they are determined by universal rational principles, as a prudent man would determine them. The rational faculties are likewise of two kinds. One is calculative and grasps rational principles of variable things; the other is scientific and grasps rational principles of invariable things. The calculative faculty is the source of two intellectual virtues: art, the virtue of making, and prudence, the virtue of doing. The scientific faculty is the source of the three intellectual virtues of knowing, the virtues of scientific proof, intuition, and wisdom. Prudence has its applications and exemplifications in the state and in the individual. When it is concerned with the individual man himself, it is called `prudence.' But as man exercises prudence it may be called economics, legislation, or politics; politics, in turn, is divided into deliberative and judicial prudence.

These basic distinctions set up univocal differentiations between choice, which is concerned with means, and wish, which is concerned with ends; and between character and rational principles, of desire and reason, as the sources of virtue. They have been merged by the reduction of the invariable to the variable and by the consequent transformation of scientific into calculative virtues. `Deliberation,' `choice,' and `decision' are no longer limited to things which are contingent and within our control. They are used also to know things which are variable but not in our control, and things which are invariant and under our control; they have taken over the functions of `demonstration,' `intuition' and `proof.'

Aristotle distinguished arts, prudence, and science as the intellectual virtues of making, doing, and knowing; but the scientific analysis of those virtues did not determine the scientific methods of the productive, practical, and theoretic sciences. We have adapted the vocabulary of those distinctions to reduce intellectual virtues and scientific methods to moral virtues. We have done so by introducing man and his decisions into the processes and the nature of art, policy, and science, and then by reconstructing them according to the rules and choices of games.

Justice occupies a crucial place in the relations of man and society, in the formation and activation of men by societies, and in the constitution and operation of societies by men. Aristotle emphasizes the univocal character of that distinction by remarking that `justice' is an equivocal term whose meanings are as far apart as those of `key' as the collar-bone of an animal and the instrument to lock a door. It is a universal virtue since a man is formed in all his virtues by living in accordance with the laws of his society. It is a particular virtue since societies are formed and regulated by the agreements and decisions of men concerning equality. `Justice' is equivocal because there is no relation between the formation of men by societies and the formation of societies by men.

There are two forms of the particular justice by which equality is established and maintained in societies. One is distributive justice which establishes a proportion between persons and the functions and possessions assigned to them. The other is a rectificatory justice which establishes a proportion in transactions, voluntary and involuntary, between man and man. This focuses on the character of injuries done without consideration of the characters of those who injure or are injured by treating men as equal before the law. These distinctions of justice in man and in society now provides a vocabulary by which to deny those distinctions in the recognition of kinds of existing injustices to be rectified. In a time of newly emerging nations, rectificatory justice takes precedence over and determines distributive justice. The antagonistic oppositions of underprivileged and dispossessed groups in established nations make use of rectificatory justice to win assent to new forms of distributive justice. As a consequence no difference remains between universal and particular justice, for the virtues of universal justice imposed by the establishment are injustices to be rectified when rectificatory justice establishes a new distributive justice to take the place of established inequalities and injustices.

Metaphysics as a science of being and first principles provides principles and causes operative in sciences of man and of society and applicable to problems of individuals and communities. Metaphysics as an art of statement and action takes its beginnings, its materials and its motivations, rational and emotional, from the oppositions of particular men and societies. A vocabulary of univocal terms is no less useful in an art of metaphysics than in a science. A science of first principles fixes their meanings and references by the scientific methods of the various sciences. An art of grounding one of two opposed statements or actions or of assimilating them in a more comprehensive statement or more inclusive action opens up new meanings and moves to new references.

The relation, man and society, as disclosed by what men say and do is heuristic in its orientation and concrete in its foundations. Insight into the relations of persons and communities breaks the dogmatisms which are the source of antagonistic oppositions and leads to revolutions and reformations in the communications and cooperations of men. It preserves a plurality of cultures by reviving them in statement and in action in an embracing world culture whose unity is the community it establishes for the development and enrichment of a diversity of cultures. It finds a basis for the establishment of justice in existing injustices in men and in societies, and in a rectificatory justice which establishes new distributions of function and property in which men seek equality, not in powers, but in rights, and freedom, not in acquisition, but in activity. It looks toward in a just society which seeks common realization for individuals and communities not in overcoming oppositions, but in assimilating to each other innovations and achievements in art, science, and policy.

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

CONFUCIUS, ARISTOTLE, AND

CONTEMPORARY REVOLUTIONS:

ELLEN M. CHEN

In his illuminating paper Professor McKeon provided a synopsis of the architectonic structure of Aristotle's philosophical enterprise which, as the culmination of Greek thought, had "laid down the pattern and established the vocabulary of culture and philosophy in the West."  He has also delineated the changing interpretations of Aristotle in the successive ages in the West, and drew a careful picture of the dynamic state of affairs on the contemporary social, national and international scene. The central thrust of Professor McKeon's paper is a defense and clarification of Aristotle's position against criticisms of his conceptions of property, slavery, youth and women. Of these four issues on which Aristotle's opinions have been considered wrong the issue of property in its economic aspect is generic and inclusive of the other three: slaves, youths and women were properties of men who were masters, sires and lords. I shall therefore not enter into the issue of property in its economic aspect; but rather, regarding the economic aspect as pervading the other three, I shall address myself to the issues of slaves, youth and woman on which modern revolutions have been based.

In view of the renewed interest on Confucius in China, it is opportune, while commenting on the issues that have turned the moderns against Aristotle, also to comment on Confucius' ideas on the same issues which also have been attacked in modern times. In this way it can be seen that the new metaphysical awakening which has brought about the contemporary revolutions is not limited to the West, but is a universal phenomenon bringing changes to cultures and traditions far apart. Consequently my reflections will cover the following three points:

1. The justice of modern criticisms against Aristotle by arguing that Aristotle's treatment of master-slave relation which serves as model for the male-female and father-son relation, is reflective of his entire enterprise from physics to metaphysics.

3. The metaphysical significance of today's liberation movements.

According to Professor McKeon, criticisms of Aristotle's conceptions of property, slavery, youth, and women are "misinterpretations of Aristotle, for they neglect the distinction between the meanings Aristotle gave to `nature' in practical and in theoretic sciences." The purpose of ethics and politics was "practical, to lead men to perform good actions, not theoretic, to discover and demonstrate the final good." Thus according to Aristotle, practically, politically and economically, some men are slaves, even though theoretically, psychologically and according to nature, no men are slaves.

My question is: can a practical science stand on its own without being supported by its theoretical foundation? Either Aristotle has to abandon the unity of the sciences, or admit the disjunction of theory and practice in his system. Neither, I maintain, is the case.

The parallel between Aristotle's ethics and politics and his physics and metaphysics is unmistakable. The serious recognition and study of motion in his physics eventually points to the motion that moves least as best, motion being a sign of dependency and restlessness. The study of substances in his metaphysics begins as a study of general ontology (ens commune) inclusive of physical substances, but eventually it centers on the study of those pure eternal forms transcending the physical realm, and finally upon the contemplation of the one self-enclosed Thought-Thinking-Itself. In the same way the study of man and society in his ethics and politics begins with acceptance of man as social (he is neither god nor beast), but ultimately it exalts those values that enable man to be independent of society. In every subject matter, whether physics, metaphysics, ethics or politics, self-sufficiency is the highest norm for Aristotle.

Unlike Plato for whom the only just life is the life of the philosopher, Aristotle begins his inquiries into ethics and politics by treating every level of human life on its own terms. But it is a question whether Aristotle had consistently carried out his promise. Whitney J. Oates says:

While allowing man to be by nature social, self-sufficiency remains for Aristotle the highest value even in ethics and politics. As a physical being man is not self-sufficient, only the state is self-sufficient. Thus the citizen has his nature fulfilled in the state. This means that according to Aristotle sociality as a value is subordinated to self-sufficiency or a-sociality. Sociality in the nature of incomplete beings, i.e., the citizens, is for the sake of forming the self-sufficient individual, the state, which is by nature a-social. (Hence the necessary business of making war in the very definition of a state).

When Aristotle says that man is by nature social, he is looking at man as man, neither god nor beast. But when he says that contemplation is the most self-sufficient activity, which would be the true happiness for man, he is speaking of man as aspiring to the life of god. As a thinking being man can be self-sufficient. If liberality, justice, courage and temperance all require external means for completion, contemplation requires nothing but solitude. In the final analysis the man of philosophical wisdom can rise above sociality and above the human condition. He alone is the true master.

Clearly there is in Aristotle a built-in tension between what is by nature and what is the best for man, for if man lives according to nature he will not attain the best. In the end happiness consists not in the fulfillment of what is properly human, but it resides in the activity of his thinking power alone. This is why the slave, though a man and by definition having a rational soul, since his mode of existence is primarily that of the body, has to enter into a relationship of inequality with the master. Thus in the actual social context the unity of man undergoes a bifurcation: the master whose activity is supposedly mind moves from being a man to a god, while the slave whose activity is mainly that of the body moves from being a man to a beast. This bifurcation applies equally to the relation between male and female, with the male compared to the form, agent, and final cause while the female performs only the function of the material cause; and between the father and the son, with the father as the actualized form toward which the son as the potentiality in process of actualization is moving.

Just as what Aristotle considered to be science and demonstrative knowledge was no more than reasoned beliefs, what he took to be "natural human relations" in his ethics and politics were not natural, but certainly conventional. The distinction between physis and nomos consists in this: nomos was based on man's understanding of physis, hence a change in nomos indicated a new insight into physis. All the so-called "natural relations" have been historically conditioned; in that sense nature is a product, not a principle. In this light, the shift from viewing human relation based on "natural relations" in Aristotle to "natural rights" in modern times has been a giant step toward the liberation of mankind, for the concept of "natural rights" provides the corrective for what is wrong in the practice of "natural relations." There is truly a sense, according to Rousseau, that we move through history to nature, and that even now we are groping toward the nature of things. Following Rousseau we may say that many "natural relations" maintained in the past have been indeed most unnatural, and it takes all the task of civilization to make man natural.

If today people identify themselves with the oppressed side of their parentage, this was not Confucius' way. Confucius was born to a concubine of an official. Not unlike the motion of Eros in Plato's Symposium, Confucius desired only the qualities of his father whose manners and life style he adopted. In the Analects we read that he refused to relinquish his carriage to be exchanged for an outer coffin for his favorite disciple Yen Yuan, who died at the age of thirty-two, offering his own noble lineage as an excuse.

Confucius was a native of Sung, and a descendent of the Shang, who were conquered by the Chou. Yet his conscious and unconscious thoughts were filled with the glory of the conqueror's culture, exclaiming: "How admirable is its culture, I follow Chou" (Analects 3:14). Living at a time when Chou was already on the decline, Confucius took it to be his life's mission to revive the power of Chou. He even dreamed often of his idol the Duke of Chou, founder and consolidator of Chou culture and institutions as well as Chou political power, and interpreted the fact that as his years advanced he no longer dreamed of the Duke to be a sign of his own failing mission. (Analects 7:5)

Aristotle's attitude toward women was condescending; Confucius' statements on women verge on the contemptuous. He spoke of women and "hsiao jen" and of "hsiao jen" and thief, in the same breath:

In Confucius' disciples the tension between labor and virtue disappeared. The superiority of mental work over physical work became a dogma which poisoned the thinking of generations upon generations. Even Chairman Mao, liberator of the Chinese proletariat, wrote in his autobiography that during his student days he had to set aside a sum from his very meagre allowance in order to buy the water he needed. Since an educated man does no menial work, carrying his own water from the river would be too demeaning.

In contrast to the anti-Confucius campaign of the 1960's, which was orchestrated by the government for the purpose of purging certain supposedly illiberal elements within the party, the anti- Confucian movement in early Republican China was the expression of a crisis of civilization. It arose out of a deeply felt need among the Chinese intellectuals to reform China's social and political institutions, and to experiment in science and democracy.² The problem was how to transform China into a modern state without giving up its time-hallowed values. To the partisans of the early period it meant a choice between adhering to the dead weight of China's tradition or opting for the modern Western way.

From our analysis of the theory of man in Aristotle and Confucius we see that there is no need to make such an irrevocable choice. Both Confucius and Aristotle were burdened with the inconsistencies which today we call historical necessity but which they took to be simply in the nature of things. There is always the question of how much a thinker can break the tablets of his own time and still express the spirit of his age. At the same time, both Confucius and Aristotle, as great thinkers, have provided what Professor McKeon calls "the vocabulary for their own correction."

The cumulative efforts of civilization, the ideals of great thinkers and humanists, aided by advancements made in science and technology, have enabled the moderns to fulfill the desires of the ancients while removing their inconsistencies. In becoming modern we do not have to reject the deepest values of the past. Rather, the task of the present and future is the liberation of the past from its own inconsistencies. By discovering new ways to bring into concrete realization the values and aspirations of the past, the present makes the past more consistent with itself, and thus its values and aspirations can be truly saved. History has a way of working out its own solutions. What is dead it leaves to rest in peace. But in the present and the future whatever is worth saving from the past is truly preserved, fulfilled, renewed, and enlarged. Thus history, which conditions everything, recedes to make room for the emergence of what transcends history. Modernity means the illumination and at the same time in the light of a new freedom the removal of the historical necessity with which the past was burdened. The universal realization of the aspirations of the best, which was impossible at the time of Confucius and Aristotle, is exactly the challenge today.

On the other hand, it is true that Confucianism had not contributed to the development of modern science in China whereas Aristotle's scientific studies had laid the foundation for progress in the West. The main difference between China and the West which is responsible for the general conservativeness of Chinese society and institutions in contrast to the dynamism in Western culture, lies in the long absence in China of the habit of critical intelligence vigilant over ruling ideas and practices. The exaltation of Confucianism since the Han times, as the state cult which monopolized the educational enterprise and discouraged independent thinking, had much to do with the absence of that dialectical process which is possible only when rival schools of thought freely stimulate and challenge each other.³ But that responsibility rests with Confucius' disciples, not Confucius himself.

The Worker

The message brought by the liberation of the worker is that nous resides not in the ruler alone, but in the ordinary man as well. Mencius spoke for all ancients when he declared it to be a universal principle that: "Some labor with their minds and some labor with their muscles. Those who labor with their minds govern others while those who labor with their muscles are governed by others." (Mencius 3A4) The I-ching (Book of Changes), however, acknowledges that Tao was in all men, that "the ordinary people live by it (tao) every day, although they are not aware of it."⁴ It was exactly the lack of awareness on the part of the ordinary people that had kept them in shackles. With heightened awareness through the implementation of universal education or dissemination of revolutionary ideologies democracy becomes inevitable. Whether today's majority of mankind still, according to Aristotle's yardstick and in Professor McKeon's words, "lack the power to make fundamental decisions bearing on their own welfare or that of the community of which they are members" (p. 8), is beside the point. It is the faith of democracy that when the common people are given the opportunity to make their choice, they produce the most stable and equitable society.

Hobbes was the first philosopher to take the common man and his passions seriously; thus he accused Aristotle of expounding an aristocratic philosophy. Locke was the first one to recognize the value of labor. Though he did not quite see the metaphysical significance of his economic theory, it was he who showed that labor was the pathway to dignity, that the laborer, by increasing the value of nature, was the true liberator of mankind. With Marx's definition of man as a worker, there is no more dichotomy between mental and physical labor. The division of labor between mind and muscles, which to Confucius and Aristotle was the foundation of their hierarchic conception of the world, need not be repudiated. What must be repudiated is that conception of a hierarchy of worth and value which excludes physical labor and is easily used as an excuse for oppression. Henceforth mind and muscles must enjoy equal partnership in the production of a just society.

Youth

There was a time when culture, civilization and science all pertained to a fixed, eternal order. Confucius looked back to the golden age when culture and virtue were complete. The Confucian teaching on rites and music was comparable to Aristotle's notion of paideia as both education and culture. Admirable as their theories of education were, both Confucius and Aristotle lacked a perception of the growth aspect in culture.

Today's youth revolt and generation gap is at least partially due to the rapid advancement of science and knowledge in the last fifty years. Often a teenager today has mastered more basic knowledge in science or know-how than his parents. Thus it is the case now that, not only must parents teach their children, but children must also teach their parents. Since authority and proprietorship go with knowledge, the vanguard of Nous now appears younger and younger. That the young are in the process of growth means that Nous is also in time and history and has a growth aspect. The child is not merely the potential in the process of actualization, but this actualizing process of the child is also the actualization of Nous itself. Here we must all become children again. In and through the child in all of us Nous is set free to have movement and progress. In this light childhood, as full of the sense of wonder, of freshness of being, and of life's adventures, is not a stage to be outgrown, but an end in itself.

Woman

For ages women had scaled down the power of their intellect to devote themselves to their supposed primary function of child bearing and rearing. The woman's liberation signals the union of the earthly Aphrodite with the heavenly Aphrodite in Plato. We have arrived at an age when the reproductive power on earth is no longer a blind instinct, but has become a conscious, rational choice.

Even more significantly, the liberation of woman, symbol of the bearing of life on earth, also means reason's attainment of life and fertility on earth. Woman's unique experience of change and growth in and around her body is an invaluable asset, a necessary and essential ingredient, for the kind of thinking that is life-enhancing and earth-affirming. Nous is no longer an ascetic, life-negating force, but becomes creative in the very fabric of life.

Today we celebrate the return of Nous to the world. We notice that slaves, youth and women in their social roles perform primarily the three functions of the vegetative soul in Aristotle's psychology: slaves supplied the nutritive needs to the body, youth's primary function is to grow and women were meant for the function of reproduction. This shows how deeply rooted the majority of human beings have been in the biological sphere. Yet Aristotle believed that "the excellence of the reason (nous) is a thing apart" (N.E. 1178a22-23). It is clear that Aristotle's ethics and politics are rooted in his psychology and his psychology is rooted in his metaphysical notion of the excellence and independence of thinking itself. This exaltation and separation of the reasoning power over other powers of the soul, this tyranny of mind over body in the history of philosophy, East and West, thus reveals itself to be the cause, as well as justification, of man's alienation from the world and man's oppression of man. Reason, man's pride and jewel, which has enabled him to produce his glorious cultures and civilizations, and often reckoned to be the seat of his spirituality, has also been the agent of man's degradation of man.

Today's liberation movements herald an age when Nous is no longer seen as holding a destiny separate from the world, but is fully naturalized to become the logos of change in the world itself. The proper function of intelligence is not a process of cutting off, but union. Intelligence is rooted in life, its function is exactly the service and liberation of physical life on earth, thus its turning back to life is indeed homecoming.

St. John's University

Jamaica, New York

1. Whitney J. Oates, Aristotle and the Problem of Value (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 316.

2. See Chow Tse-tsung, "The Anti-Confucian Movement in Early Republic China," in A.F. Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford, 1960), pp. 288-312.

3. Taoism and Buddhism were not interested in social reform, though they were strong rivals to Confucianism in matters religious and metaphysical. Taoism's contribution to the development of Chinese science is now universally recognized. Yet lacking the spirit of social involvement, its scientific activities have made no impact on the betterment of man's social relations.

4. The Hsi Tz'u, Part I, Chap. 5. Cf. Richard Wilhelm's translation: The I Ching (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 298.

PERSON,

PERSONALITY AND ENVIRONMENT

PETER A. BERTOCCI

My thesis will be that we can better understand the actual development of human beings in their environments if we distinguish more adequately person from personality. I am aware that "person" and "personality" are often used inter-changeably, and that, for reasons now familiar, "personality" has been substituted generally in the social sciences for the hoary philosophical concepts of soul, spirit, mind, self, and person. Yet, it would not be difficult to show that the general conflation of "person" and "personality" is not complete. For example, when we exhort someone to "be a person" we are not asking them to become what they inevitably are, either a person or a personality, but a certain quality of person and personality. Again, in crusading against depersonalization or dehumanization, we do not suppose that a person can become a non-person or have no personality at all, but that as a person one deserves a certain quality of treatment. Once more, in shifting from "chairman" to "chairperson," we still expect the chairperson to have a personality of some sort; we recognize something that transcends gender and personality, namely, the person.

I am, however, not interested in rescuing words. My underlying concern, which this paper can begin to express, is to show that both "person" and "personality" are required if we are to develop a more solid appreciation for what is involved when we think about the dynamism of personality-development (or self- realization, or personal fulfillment) in the various branches of the social sciences and philosophy.

1. Let us turn directly to the contrast I have in mind by citing the definition of personality framed by a social psychologist, Gordon W. Allport, whose efforts to bring systemization to the psychology of personality have commanded unusual respect. His definition reflects a life-long concern to free the unique pattern and growth of personality from the confinements of behavioristic-operational and positivistic method, and from the clutches of favored biological and social norms. His thought also reflects the influences of the philosopher-psychologists William James, Mary Whiton Calkins, John Dewey, Wilhelm Stern, G.F. Stout, James Ward, and William McDougall.¹

Allport's definition reads: "Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical system that determine his characteristic behavior and thought."² This definition of personality refers both to organized and organizing psychophysiological systems. In Allport's work there is never any doubt that personality is a joint-product of the interaction of the individual and his natural-social environment. What is systematically ambiguous in his thought, and in the literature of the social sciences generally, is what is meant by "within the individual." I have in mind more than Allport's comprehensive system as I proffer and defend the following definition in order to render more coherent data in the psychology of personality: Personality is the organization by a self-identifying person of his or her own psychophysiological wants and abilities that uniquely characterizes their expressive and adaptive adjustments to their environment.

2. The basic issue we face is this: Can personality, with its admittedly unique or characteristic organization, take the place of, or be identical with, a unifying person?

Long ago Stern proclaimed: Keine Gestalt ohne Gestalter, James' insisted that consciousness is owned, and both Ward and McDougall emphasized that psychic monads with their own unique demands had windows open to varied environments. They would not dream of holding that the individual could fulfill himself or herself, let alone exist, in complete isolation from his or her environment. No individual simply unfolds or matures; they require the challenge and the convergence of environments. Nevertheless, the quality of their learned responses and their patterns is never simply the product of environmental influence--natural, social, or divine. Whatever the differentiating modifications and transformations called for by interaction with these environments, there are telic tendencies embedded in the matrix of abilities that constitute the individual, and these tendencies are always involved in the selective response one makes both to one's own abilities and to the environment.

In James' terms, then, each person is a fighter for ends. What needs further stress is that all fighters for ends, whatever their unlearned similarities with the abilities and motives of others, undergo conflicts as their own nature matures unevenly, as they interact selectively with their environments. As C.I. Lewis once said, "the individual may not control what happens to him, but the meaning he gives to what happens to him is subject to his active selectivity--within limits that are not easily defined."³

Despite the continuing controversy about what telic factors are innate in persons, it may be noted that resistance by personality-theorists to unlearned tendencies depends on whether (and how) the adaptability of human beings is recognized--the adaptability being possible because in human beings especially abilities are loosely geared to innate needs.⁴ But there is no final denial--except by those who would reduce even physiological phenomena to the physico-chemical--of the animating telic thrusts whose permutations influence what will be salient, gratifying, or relevant even at the level of human sensory perception. In passing, it may be noted that even the behavior of Pavlov's dogs reflected their hunger in a stimulus-situation; and B.F. Skinner's pigeons are hardly impervious to the inner biological situation that gives purchase to reinforcement.

3. I am urging, accordingly, that the tensions, conflicts, and anxieties that occur have their locus, not in the interstices between individuals (persons, as I shall contend) and society but within the telic persons whose natures allow them to give different meanings and values to what goes on as, at the various stages in their maturational-adaptive-expressive experience, they interact with their environments. Telic persons are not market-places where different avenues converge to form their natures; their inherited (affective-conative-cognitive) activities are not centers of influences; nor is their developing personality a mere complex of statistical averages. Persons--whatever else--go on fighting for ends that are expressed adaptively as they learn more specific ways of gratifying them. The environment is their environment and their personality is their way of organizing their responses to environments, and in ways that they perceive to be open for them.

Neither persons nor their personalities, in sum, are mirrors of society or culture, any more than children are mirrors of their family. Such generalized descriptions break down once one sees that society, culture, and family, are relative abstractions to persons who, given their unique endowment in their corner of the world, at their stage of development, confront situation after situation internal to their being and beyond it. Child-persons interact with father and mother as "psychological environments" to which the children are sensitive in different ways; and they take on the meanings open to their outlook at different stages in their development. Parent's actual effect upon children is a joint-product in which their own response to their parents expresses their own interpretation of what the parents mean to them. At the same time, people's personalities are no mere accretions, because they bear the dynamic marks of their wanting-knowing abilities as, in relatively patterned ways, they realize what they can become as they seek to gratify or satisfy their instinctive needs.⁵

The nature, number, and dynamics of unlearned telic tendencies make considerable difference, especially to educational and social theory. For personality, let alone its assessment, is the person's own mode of response to himself/herself in their environments. What I wish to stress is that the locus of action and change is the person with his or her matrix of needs and abilities. Never without an environment, persons purposively and purposefully select modes of expression and adjustment that reflect their varied responses to their environments, that is, to the natural, the social, and the divine world as they are able to appraise them. There is no personality without person. Person is also the unit for social science, for the conflicts that go on between groups occur in the persons who are constantly expressing themselves and adapting themselves to environments.

4. My second main theme is related to this first and emerges from developments in the psychology of personality that called forth reconstructed philosophical concepts. Thus, the ego re-appeared in Freudian thought as an essentially conscious and self-conscious cognitive function. It may seem a far cry from this ego to the Cartesian cogito as a being who thinks, although it is not so far if we remember that Descartes defined a thinking being as one who "doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses . . . imagines and feels."⁶ The fact remains, in any case, that in Freudian thought the ego, beginning as the servant of the id from which its energy derives, seems, nevertheless, to have its own capacity to guide development. But this development requires selective organization and involves both the formation of the ego-ideal and the more rigid super-ego. Both ego-ideal and super-ego reflect the compromise, if you will, open to a telic agent (more reflective than the unconscious id) in its interaction with the natural-social environment. In short, the organizing of inner urges, in accordance with the individual's perception of the environmental situation and with his/her appraisal of optional hedonic consequences, is attributed--as it was not in earlier Freudian formulations--to what the ego can consciously know.

I would further emphasize here that the ideal: "where the id is, there shall the ego be," calls, not for substituting a cognitive ego for the affective-conative id, but for a wanting- knowing ego whose appraisals of "individual" and "social" demands reduce conflict and produce greater harmony. The ego, we must infer, though born in a womb of non-rational instincts, experiences a rational demand to organize his or her total experience in accordance with norms of logic and inductive inference. In short, the ego that reappeared in Freudian thought is never completely independent of impulse or environment as it engages in the formation of patterns of individual-social life or personality without being reduced or confined to any learned pattern.

5. But the term "ego" made a different reappearance in ego-psychology that had no special links with conceptions of the unconscious.⁷ Social psychologists and psychologists of personality who had decided that their science was well rid of anything reminiscent of the soul or ontological self, now used self and ego to interpret a phenomenon that involves the unity and continuity of the personalities acquired in environmental situations. Sarah and Ruth, Saul and Paul, are unique minded-bodies, to be sure. The relatively organized personalities that characterize them would not be what they are without an acquired central and abiding psychological core that gives each his/her own quality of unity and continuity. Sarah and Ruth are now to be understood not only by their more or less systematic responses in environments, their personalities, but also, and better, by a learned center or focus that illuminates their own unique organization as they respond. For example, tasks that they learn will be more effectively and enduringly learned if Sarah and Ruth are self-involved, or ego-involved. Moreover, many of their most significant conflicts, anxieties, gratifications and satisfactions are experienced when the egos in their personality are engaged in whatever transaction is taking place. Defense mechanisms, for example, are developed in order to protect the ego in the personality.

To be more specific, G.W. Allport, after extensively reviewing research, noted the difference that ego-involvement makes to "attention, judgment, memory, motivation, aspiration level, productivity, and . . . the operation of personality-traits."⁸ Such studies, he infers, indicate that personalities are not collective assemblages. In his own most systematic exposition, Allport, hoping to avoid the historic ambiguities of the world "self," hit upon the word proprium to designate what was "warm" and "central" to each personality, the "intimate region of personality involved in matters of importance to the organized emotional life of the individual."⁹

In sum, this psychologist of personality found that better psychological anchorage is required for the organization of learned dispositions in personality, especially when matters of importance or priority involving its unity and continuity are involved. The place assigned by many psychologists to `ego-identification^,10 as a process vital to the development of personality, is recognition of the need to unify factors within the personality as the person constantly responds to his own learned formations in personality and assign priorities. In all this, as in the case of Freudian theory, the rejected or neglected self has returned with its own primary unity and continuity, that is, as knower, rather than as known, as agent in organizing and not simply as product of organization.

Let me approach my suggestion by reference to the change of Saul to Paul. Saul and Paul are both personalities. The Saul that gives way to Paul is a personality nurtured in a prized community. That personality as a whole does not vanish when Saul becomes Paul. But the self-concept dominating Saul could not be harmonized with new assessments that grew out of experiences of conflict with Christian communities. Surely, it was not the personalities and the egos that did the knowing and the wanting, since they were products of knowing-wanting. It is the knowing-wanting person that was engaged in Saul. What came into being on the road to Damascus was not a new person, not an entirely new personality, but a new ego or self-image that the person later expressed by "I am one with Christ . . . ," as he changed his personality. In brief, Saul and Paul are both personalities with egos that a unique knowing-wanting person learns. He does this as he makes his way in particular natural- social-divine environments which he perceives as they affect him. But both Saul and Paul are the expressions and adaptations of the person involved in them.

6. My concern, then, is to distinguish between the unique unity-in-continuity of the person without which there is no understanding of the unique unity and continuity of personality and ego that are the products of interaction with the total environment. Further analysis of the changing yet relatively continuous organization of personality and ego would also reveal, I suggest, the theoretical need for (self-identifying) agent- persons whose constitutive nature is not generated by the environment, who are no passive re-actors to their ambient, and who discover the range of quality of their own existence only as they interact with environments that provide opportunities for actualizing their potential. Nor is this the place to develop the theme that man is a creator of symbols because he is a self-identifying wanting-knower whose meanings overflow symbols and language, as H.H. Price¹¹ has taught us. A personality and its ego--that is, a changing yet relatively patterned personality responsive to inner and outer environment--reflects the meanings and values of an agent-person whose varied motives are continuous and discontinuous with those already at work before self-conscious criticism and evaluation take place.

This personality cannot be substituted for the person. At the core of this contention is the conviction that no theory of acquired personality can forever postpone the question: Is it the personality that senses, wants, feels, remembers, imagines or thinks? What is wanted and learned can hardly be wanter and learner. Using Stern's terminology, there is a unitas multiplex, a person, who is active and not only reactive to his environments. The minimal proposal here is that both a Saul and a Paul are the joint-products of a psycho-physiological telic agent, a person, who, interacting with factors within and beyond his control, organizes both sensory and non-sensory experiences into habits, attitudes, sentiments, traits, and egos that reflect the quality of his adaptation and expression in relation to environments. Again, anyone who would substitute personality for person must confront the fact that the personality cannot at once know and be the result of knowing, cannot itself act and be the result of interaction, cannot itself evaluate and be the product of evaluation. Personalities cannot be treated like islands that have drifted away from the mainland that continues to respond to the tides of existence.

7. In closing, I can only hint at a view of the person that will fit the personality-situation I have been depicting. Alas, our discussion of the relation of the person to his or her personality may have dredged up the image of an Atlas balancing the world of personality that is no part of it. Indeed, a main reason, expressed explicitly by Allport, for rejecting the dominant, historic concept of a substantive self or person is that the psychology of personality in particular must avoid an homunculus that is at worst redundant and in any case circular. The charge of redundancy and circularity I must neglect. But I think it does misconstrue the theoretical situation. In any case, is it less circular to say that the organism, or the individual, does so and so?

But while I shall continue to insist on the need for a self-identifying person (elusive in our experience of ourselves, but undeniable as H.D. Lewis¹² has effectively shown), the patterning and growth of personality by itself requires us to reconsider the conception of an unchanging substance-person. Assuming that the change, growth, and structure of personality call for a self-identifying unity in which we can distinguish such activities as sensing, remembering, imagining, thinking, feeling, wanting--and I should want to add willing, oughting, and aesthetic and religious appreciating--it is important to realize that these activities of the person are not exhausted by their formations and their particular objects and objectives at any one stage, although they are limited in the scope of their potential. The person at any point is nothing other or transcending these activity-potentials, whose expression and adaptation are engaged in the formation of personality. It is the irreducible unity-in- continuity of the person that is the common thesis of my personalistic teachers, Borden Parker Bowne,¹³ Edgar S. Bright- man,¹⁴ and Frederick R. Tennant.¹⁵ With them I think we must insist that there can be no succession of experiences (or of changes such as we find in personality) without an experience of succession. The person it is who cries: When me you fly, I am the wings.

The articulation of the nature of such unified persons must continue to command our attention. But, the personality that is at once their expression and also their limiting formation can hardly be an unchanging, non-temporal, and self-identical being. We must look for our model, with Bergson and Brightman, in the kind of time-binding unity that we find at any moment of experience. Within limits this time-binding, being-becoming selectively nurtures itself in interaction with the environment and, insofar as it survives, is forever crescent--adaptive and expressive--in the patterns of its personality. Hence the person is never self-identical but self-identifying. I, for one, can find no referent in my experience for any kind of self-identical wanting-knowing person; the data of personality-formation call for self-identifying that is never mathematical. If to be is to act, if to be a person is to act expressively and adaptively in a total environment, the person is better defined as being-becoming whose self-identifying witnesses to continuity in active unity.¹⁶

Since this view will suggest to many the route or serial view of a cumulative identity proposed by some process philosophers, which is well represented in the work of Charles Hartshorne.¹⁷ My main obstacle to that particular view is that I cannot understand how the person at any moment can reach a present in time and selectively incorporate his/her given past into a present self-identity. I suggest rather that the given initial and primary unity "enlarges" selectively as its constitutive activity-potentials mature, respond to the environment and, therefore, becomes pregnant, via its personality formations.

Thus, there is another equally important pole to my earlier contention that there can be no personality without person. For the personality at any stage of organization, is no appendage to the person; it is no coat that can be discarded leaving a pristine knowing-wanting person. The actual existent at any point is person-cum-personality. The person is always not simply "immanent" in his/her personality. The person is shaping and being shaped, modifying and being modified, expressing and being expressed. This is the ongoing life of the person in maturation and in interaction. Again, the personality-structure(s) can both express and control the person. A unique person-cum-unique personality is the complete person at any stage.

While such a proposal places the actual selective agency in the persons and their complex activity-potentials, it makes full allowance for their interplay with the total environment and for the vital importance of environmental influence to the quality of the person-cum-personality. There is never a neat dividing line between the private and the public person-cum-personality. The reality is always persons engaged in forging, critically and uncritically, the personality that gives a particular form and content to that person's investment at any point in their history, without necessarily being captured by the organization and priorities of any particular personality. The consequences of this formulation of the relation of person to personality will influence the interpretation of the nature of free will and moral obligation, as well as the interpretation of the values in moral, aesthetic and religious experience, but these are themes for other occasions.¹⁹

Boston University

Boston, Mass.

1. Gordon W. Allport, The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), contains essays on Stern, James, Dewey, Karl Buhler, and K. Lewin. The interchangeable use of "person" and "personality" is reflected in the above titles of Allport's books as well as in Personality and Social Encounter (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960/1981), and The Nature of Personality: Selected Papers (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1950/1975).

2. Gordon W. Allport, Pattern and Growth in Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 28. Chap. 2 provides a useful discussion of "personality."

3. C.I. Lewis, The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1955), p. 26.

4. William McDougall, Energies of Man (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1933).

5. Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harpers and Bros., 1954).

7. Gordon W. Allport, "The Ego in Contemporary Psychology," Psychological Review 50 (1943), 451-578. See my discussion of Allport's theme in "The Psychological Self, the Ego, and Personality," Psychological Review 52 (1945), 91-99.

8. Gordon W. Allport, Pattern and Growth in Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), p. 128.

9.  Gordon W. Allport, ibid., p. 127.

10. See Gordon W. Allport, ibid., Chapter 6 for an introduction to the literature. The works of Erik Erikson are central contributions to the phenomena of self-identification.

11. H.H. Price, Thinking and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).

12. H.D. Lewis, The Elusive Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).

13. Borden P. Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1879).

14. Edgar S. Brightman, Person and Reality, ed. P.A. Bertocci (New York: Ronald Press, 1958).

15. Frederick R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, Vol. I, The World, the Soul, and God. (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1928).

16. Peter A. Bertocci, The Person God Is (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), chapters 2-6.

17. Peter A. Bertocci, "Hartshorne on Personal Identity: A Personalistic Critique," Process Studies 2 (Fall, 1972), 216-221.

18. Peter A. Bertocci, The Person God Is, see chapters 2-6.

CHAPTER IV

INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

IN METAPHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE

IVOR LECLERC

My aim in this paper is to deal specially with the metaphysical issues involved in the topic: man and society.

It is not surprising to find that there is a consonance between the metaphysics involved in the doctrines of a particular school or trend of thought respecting man and society and the metaphysics involved in that school's doctrines respecting other fields, such as nature for example. Indeed it would be surprising if there were not a single metaphysics underlying the particular doctrines and conceptions. When one examines from this point of view the rise and development of modern thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such an underlying metaphysics is what one does find.

What we now generally designate modern thought in contrast, for example, to medieval, arose and developed on the basis of a new conception of nature. This conception in turn was grounded in the renaissance resuscitation of Neoplatonism, in opposition to the antecedent domination of Scholastic Aristotelianism. Fundamental in this Neoplatonism was a Neoplatonic metaphysics and in particular a Neoplatonic ontology.

Neoplatonism, from Plotinus, had confirmed and emphasized the conception of being found in Plato,¹ namely of being as changeless, permanent, static. This conception was basic in the thought of St. Augustine, who states, e.g.,: "For it is only that which remains in being without change that truly is."² It was this conception of being which was given a new and pregnant formulation by Nicolaus Cusanus in the fifteenth century in his doctrine of being, the Maximum, as coincidentia oppositorum, as containing all complicans, and of the world, i.e., created being, as explicatio Dei. The full implications of Cusanus' doctrine came to fruition in the seventeenth century theories of man.

But initially it was a new theory of physical nature which was developed in the seventeenth century, the theory of the physical as matter. Not only was matter, for the first time in history, accorded the status of a self-subsistent being or existent, but its being was conceived fully in accord with the fundamental Neoplatonic conception of being. Matter was held to be created by God, the perfect, changeless, creating being, in an image of that perfection, this image having the form of perfect, in-itself-changeless, completely homogeneous mathematical extension. This was the essential Neoplatonic conception of being in a novel doctrine of the physical, whether as maintained by Descartes in his theory of a one res extensa, or as maintained by an increasing majority, in the theory of material atomism. In both theories matter in its being is completely changeless. Portions or atoms of matter undergo translation from one place to another, i.e., undergo locomotion, but in this remaining in themselves changeless and unaffected by that locomotive change. Above all, in strict accord with the basic doctrine of changeless being, matter is in itself inert, i.e., without activity, and thus completely unable to initiate locomotion: matter is moved; it does not move itself. Thus this doctrine of the physical, conceived in terms of the Neoplatonic conception of being, stands in complete contrast to the antecedent Aristotelian doctrine of the physical as having the source (arche) of its change (kinesis) in itself, this change constituting a process from potentiality to actuality, which is to say a process of coming into being.

The ineluctable consequence of this new doctrine of nature was a metaphysical dualism; mind and soul had to be accorded a separate and independent status as another kind of being. Now this other kind of being was also conceived in terms of the Neoplatonic conception of being. It was in this that the doctrine of Cusanus of complicatio-explicatio was especially fruitful. The new metaphysics had extruded "act" from the physical, but had not rejected the concept of act entirely. It was retained in the other side of the metaphysical dichotomy, but in a way fundamentally different from the Aristotelian conception of act. The new metaphysics remained consistent, in respect of mind or soul, with the Neoplatonic conception of being as perfect, changeless. In this new modern doctrine God created res cogitantes or monads as in themselves perfect, with their essence complicans in them. Thus for Descartes, for example, res cogitantes are created with their full complement of "innate ideas"; and for Leibniz the monads are likewise created with their essential ideas which constitute the law of their individual series. Thus the act of this kind of being, which is fundamentally a thinking act, is an explicatio, unfolding, of what is complicans, enfolded, in it from its beginning. The act of being of a res cogitans or a monad is in no respect a coming-into-being, a becoming, a generation; each is fully in being, and thus in itself changeless--the unfolding or explication of what is implicit is not a change in any sense of becoming; the logical process is its paradigm instance. Consistently with this both Descartes and Leibniz explicitly conceived of God as maintaining every being in its full being in every moment of its existence by an act of perpetual re-creation.

This modern form of Neoplatonic metaphysics and its fundamental ontology underlay and determined the seventeenth century theories of man and of society which came to full and mature articulation with John Locke. Man--metaphysically identified with mind or soul, with body as its immediate "property"--was conceived as an "individual," complete in its being. It is important to be clear that this is the metaphysical basis of the modern doctrine of "individualism." In terms of this basic conception man, as mind or soul, in the first place is an ontological ultimate--in the terminology of the time, a "substance." Secondly, this substance is a self-complete entity, that is, complete in respect of its being or essence, "requiring nothing but itself in order to exist" (except for God's creative act), as Descartes had consistently defined "substance" in accord with the Neoplatonic ontology. Man, as such a substance, complete in his being, has no "requirements" or "needs" other than the moral one of obeying God. There are, it is true, certain "needs" to be acknowledged, but these pertain strictly to his body, his immediate property which, metaphysically considered, falls into the other realm, that of physical nature, needs such as food, clothing, shelter, etc. Thirdly, as a self-complete being, the individual has no need of any other individual.

This means that "society," conceived as it had been from Plato and Aristotle onward, as "natural"--in the sense of being grounded in the "nature" of man, as necessary to the achievement or fulfillment of that "nature," and thereby not only itself "being natural" but also "having a nature" of its own, one accordingly determinative of man's nature--this conception of "society" had to be utterly rejected. Society, in the new modern conception, cannot be grounded in the nature of man as a natural requirement, since man, in his nature, is a complete individual, and thus does not require or need a "society," i.e., a fellowship, association, partnership, community of men, in any respect to complete his nature.

Secondly, this entails that "society" has to be accorded an ontological status quite different from that which it had in the antecedent rejected theory. "Nature," physis, in its original meaning, was contrasted with that which is a product of human artifice, and this feature of the connotation of the term had not been lost. So in the seventeenth century in rejecting the conception of society as "natural," thinkers drew the logical conclusion that society must be, by contrast, a human artifice (Hobbes), a construct or contrivance by individual men for the purpose of achieving each his own individual needs--which are strictly those in respect of his property. Consistently Locke, noting that the family or "conjugal society" is the first society, sees this as grounded not in any need of a man and a woman of each other in their being, i.e., as "individuals," but in the needs of their bodies, their property, more particularly for the propagation of other bodies³--the corresponding souls of course deriving from God's creative act.

The consequence of this "individualist" conception of man and its concomitant conception of society have been sufficiently both analysed and manifested in practice for me to need to spend much time on them here. One consequence is, however, particularly relevant to the metaphysical consideration: this is that societies have consistently failed to conform to the theory of them as artificial contrivances, on the model of the machine, with ends, purposes, and functions determined essentially from without by their artificers, the "individuals" which as such transcend ontologically the societies which they construct. The result of this is that in Western countries in which the "individualist" doctrine of man continues to constitute the fundamental guiding principle of practice, societies, especially the economic ones, the business corporations and the trade unions, have increasingly grown in size and power to an extent that they have now become out of effective control of the political society, that society which has the ends and needs of all members of the community as its purpose. This means that these countries are today floundering dangerously because of the lack of a viable philosophy of man and of society in terms of which the ends of the total community can be safeguarded and served.

In the eighteenth century, particularly with Rousseau, began the recognition of "society" as having ends, purposes, and a "will," not to be conceived as the arithmetical sum of the ends, purposes, and wills of the individual constituent members; it became clear to many thinkers that "society" has ends, purposes, and a "nature" in a significant respect transcending those of the constituents. The outcome of this recognition was the theory which accords to society, particularly the political society, the state, the ontological status of a self-subsistent being. In this theory, which derived considerably from an inaccurate and inadequate understanding of Plato, the constituent men were no longer conceived, as in the "individualist" theory, as ontologically complete beings; on the contrary, they were conceived as dependent, in respect of their being or essence, on the supreme, self-complete society, the state. This is the metaphysics of the "organic" theory of society, in terms of which individual human beings are "organs," in the etymological sense "instruments," of the state--an "organism" being a whole in which the functioning of the parts is in reference to the whole, and thus determined by the whole.

The practical consequences of this philosophy of man and of society have become sufficiently manifest, especially in the course of the last half century, to make clear the extremely urgent need for a viable alternative to both the foregoing philosophies, between them ruling the globe and threatening its destruction.

The working out of such an alternative is essentially a philosophical task, and it is an obligation which the present generation of philosophers ignores at the peril of the future of mankind. The most fundamental aspect of this task is an ontological one, the development of a theory of being in terms of which a coherent and adequate theory of the nature of man and of society will be possible. In other words, today the theories of man and of society need to be explicitly pursued in conjunction with the theory of being.

As a background to this conjoint inquiry we have seen that the modern "individualist" theory of man was grounded in a Neoplatonic theory of being. It is now necessary to recognize that the modern "organic" theory of man and of society was not based on the development of a new theory of being; on the contrary it was grounded also in the modern Neoplatonist ontology. I hardly need to remind you that the modern "organic" theory owes more to Hegel, the arch Neoplatonist of the nineteenth century, than to any other man. It seems to me of the first importance to our topic to bring to the fore and emphasize the fundamental role of ontology in the theory of man and the theory of society, and that in the modern period the Neoplatonic theory of being has dominated and determined both the alternative modern theories of man and society. In the present day ontology has become the most neglected of philosophical disciplines, one consequence of which has been considerable muddle and confusion in thought seeking to come to grips with the issues involved in the theory of man and of society.

Today we need explicitly to face the question whether an adequate and coherent theory of man and of society is possible at all in terms of the Neoplatonic theory of being, or whether it is necessary to seek another ontological basis for the theory of man and of society.

As a first step in tackling this question I would suggest that account be explicitly taken of the outcome, in human life and experience in the modern period, of the adoption of the "individualist" and the "organic" theories. Much has been written about this, and it has been dealt with also in several of the papers contributed to this meeting. I will deal with one point in this as of especial philosophical relevance. This is that these theories have survived--apart from the fact of their being in accord with the prevailing metaphysical presuppositions underlying the development of natural science from the seventeenth till the beginning of this century--these theories have survived not by their inherent theoretical virtue manifesting itself logically in practical exemplifications throughout the range of human activity; rather they have survived because human experience has necessitated practice in all spheres of endeavor and life which is strictly inconsistent with the ruling theories of man and of society, and because the respective theorists have failed to recognize the inconsistencies--since these are indeed fatal to their theories.

The actual life of human beings, it needs to be explicitly acknowledged today, is not consistently and coherently analyzable in terms either of the "individualist" or the "organic" theories. To anyone not blinded by dogmatic adherence to the "individualist" theory it should be clear that human beings do not live in essential independence of each other; on the contrary, the enormous extent and range of their interdependence is not only manifest, but their interdependence is also manifestly essential to their being--a misanthrope is generally and correctly regarded as pathological; and Hobbes' attempt to construct a theory of society on the basis of a conception of man as fundamentally misanthropic has never received acceptance. And to anyone not dogmatically adhering to the "organic" theory it should be clear that the necessary interdependence of human beings is not that of "organs," "instruments," functioning in relation to a transcendent whole; that is, their interdependence is not consistently and coherently to be construed as dependence upon the transcendent whole.

It is on this fact of the necessary interdependence of human beings on each other that any theory of man and of society based on a Neoplatonic ontology must founder. For on this ontology the human individual must be essentially self-complete, which entails that the human being is to be conceived as fundamentally without relations to his fellow human beings, "real" relations that is, in the basic meaning of "real," viz., belonging to the res itself. This is the case with both the "individualist" and the "organic" theories: the former can admit real relations in individuals only with God, and the latter only with the transcendent organic whole.

For the philosophical theory of man and of society the fact which is of cardinal importance is that of the interdependence of human beings. The first philosophical inference to be drawn from this is that interdependence necessitates that relations be seen as "real." The second is that society is to be conceived as a real relationship between individual human beings. It is evident that I am here in full accord with the position taken by Professor Johann in his paper.

But this raises as a crucial issue the problem of the ontological status of relations. And this can be effectively tackled only as part of the theory of being per se. I will approach it here in the context of our topic. We have arrived at a point in our investigation at which it has become clear that what faces us is the need of an ontology in terms of which human beings can consistently be conceived as having real relations with fellow human beings, and in terms therefore of which society can be consistently and coherently conceived. What is required is a theory of being in which the act involved in being be necessarily a relational act, and in which the relation is "real," in the full sense of the relation being an actual interconnection with another being, and not, as in the Leibnizian theory, "phenomenal," and in the Neoplatonic theory in general, wholly "internal." It is most important to emphasize that on a Neoplatonic ontology a relation necessarily has the status of a feature, attribute, or property which inheres in the being itself--for Plotinus explicitly the category of relation had to be conceived on the paradigm of an inhering quality; which is why in the Neoplatonic tradition the term "quality" came to be used as synonymous with attribute or property: a substance is "qualified" by various attributes.

Now if we hold that relation be a real interconnection, it becomes clear that there can be no fully completed being anterior to the act of relating, for that would imply the relation not being real, i.e., the interconnection not making any essential difference to the being in question. Consequently it is necessary to acknowledge that the act of being must involve a process which is other than as it is conceived in terms of the Neoplatonic ontology, namely a process of explication of what is implicit. The process must be one of the achievement of completeness, as Aristotle maintained in his conception of ousia as energeia and entelecheia, i.e., as "in-act" and as "achieving its end." This entails, again as Aristotle held, that the process involved in the act of being must be the transition from potentiality to actuality, so that the process is one of the "actualization" or "realization" of the human being. This could therefore be seen as a theory of "self-actualization" or "self-realization," but it is essential to understand the theory in a sense contrary to the similar theory held on a Neoplatonic basis. The theory of "self-realization" has been much favored by thinkers in the idealist school; in that tradition the theory is understood in terms of a Neoplatonic ontology, which means that the "realization" is of what the self is in its essence. In the alternative ontology here being presented, the "potentiality" which is "actualized" cannot be restricted to the "essence" of the being in question, but must include also what is presented by other beings in the interaction between them.

The theory of being which is necessitated here must be explicitly recognized as standing in contrast to the Neoplatonic theory of being as complete, changeless. This theory of being is one which was first propounded by Parmenides and taken over by Plato, in his middle Dialogues at least. This theory of being was grounded in an elaboration of the philosophical implications of the Greek verb "be," which rigidly excluded "becoming"--for which entirely different verbs were used, such as gignesthai, "to be born."⁴ The philosophical limitations and inadequacies of this theory of being became clear to Aristotle, who developed an alternative ontology in which "being" was not exclusive of "becoming" but in which being included a process of becoming. Neoplatonism, however, returned to the earlier conception of being, Augustine's identification of being with God serving additionally to confirm the Neoplatonic ontology in Western thought down the centuries. In the theory of man it is today most important, as Professor Bertocci has urged in his paper, to reject the "historic concept of a substantive self or person"--that is, the Neoplatonic doctrine of the self, for the concept of being as "substance" is historically the Neoplatonic doctrine--and to see the self or person rather as a being-in-becoming.

This is the conception of being, I have argued, which is necessitated by the fact of the interdependence of human beings. I have maintained further that this fact of interdependence entails the necessity of relations as real. We must now explicitly address the problem of how relations are to be conceived in terms of the foregoing theory of being. In seeking an answer to this problem it would be unacceptable to suppose that since we have rejected the Neoplatonic conception of relations as qualities inhering in the subject, the alternative is to conceive relations as some kind of tertium quid connecting the beings. This supposition would be unacceptable because it would be incoherent and inconsistent with any theory of being, since the tertium quid would by hypothesis be neither a being nor a constituent of a being; its status would thus be totally inexplicable.

The way to an answer to this problem, I submit, is that which I took earlier in conceiving relations as grounded in the act involved in being, whereby the act of being is essentially a relational act, an act of relating to other beings. I would say more specifically that the act of being is an "acting on" another and a reciprocal "being acted on" by another.

This conception has important implications: besides the general one which we have already noted, that this entails the conception of being as necessarily involving becoming, this conception entails "subjects" acting, which are not merely the outcome of the actings--I agree with Professor Bertocci that the conception of subjects as wholly the outcome, product, of acting is an incoherent one. Further entailed, I would want to argue, is that there is a whole constituted by the interacting which is something more than, and thus not adequately analyzable as the mere arithmetical sum of the interacting subjects. Moreover, that whole has a character or definiteness which is analyzable as the definiteness of the relational interacting. It must be emphasized that the definiteness or character must explicitly not be conceived on the analogy or paradigm of a quality, e.g., a color, inhering in a substratum; the definiteness here is the definiteness of an acting, i.e., constituting the "whatness" of the acting. Since the acting is relational, the "whatness" will in one aspect be that of the interacting whole.

Now I wish to submit that what we have here in such an interacting whole is a "society," in other words, that the essence of a "society" is constituted by such an interacting whole. This holds for the minimal society, that of two human beings, and for any such whole of a plurality of human beings, however great. The essential condition is that the members be reciprocally interacting. And the character or definiteness of the society in question will be determined by the character or definiteness of the interacting. It is the character of definiteness that would distinguish, for example, the society of two constituting a friendship from that constituting a marriage. Since the character or definiteness of the society is grounded in the "nature" of individuals as acting, a society is, as Aristotle maintained, "natural," and further, has a "nature" pertaining to it, one which is defined by the definiteness of the society as an interacting whole, a nature which is moreover in an important respect determinative of the individual members.

This brings us finally to the consideration of the ontological status of "society." In the theory I am proposing a society is not to be conceived as a full being in its own right, since it is essentially and fundamentally dependent upon the actings of its members. Thus the individual human beings must alone be accorded the full and primary ontological status. Only individuals can in a full, non-derivative sense be "agents," with the power of choice and decision. It is only individuals as essentially acting which can include in their being access to the criteria of the "good" which are absolutely indispensable to being as acting.

Emory University

Atalanta, Georgia

1. More specifically in the middle Dialogues. It is questionable whether this would hold for Plato of the Sophist for example.

2. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. VII, Ch. 11.

3. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. VII, Sects. 78, 79.

4. See Charles H. Kahn, The Verb `Be' in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht/Holland 1973), especially Ch. VIII, n. 5.

SELF-AWARENESS

an