The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries

The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries. David Walsh. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

For ‘unsuspecting readers:’

In the preface to The Priority of the Person David Walsh admits that some of his previous studies were not necessarily easily comprehensible to ‘unsuspecting readers.’ So, the current volume presents, he hopes, ‘a more accessible inquiry into what it means to be a person’ (x). In Walsh’s early study, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, he showed how it is not enough to begin by merely outlining and defending ‘the rightness of Christianity…and its view of human nature.’ This can remain a mere assumption on our part and therefore ‘not…[really] a discovery of experiential truth.’[1] It means we have to dig deeper in order to uncover and bring to light the existential reality of being human. It is in this way that our understanding necessarily develops as a living experience. In fact, in the very action of recovering it we become who we are as human beings. So, what we see unfold in the Walshian oeuvre is a personal intellectual and spiritual journey along a person-centric pathway. At the same time, he believes that the ‘other’ defines us as human beings. Thinking cannot be done alone, he says, ‘it is ever and always in the company of others’ [x]. The Priority of the Person, therefore, is not an investigation into words about words on the person but a reciprocal odyssey engaging author and reader alike. If we participate in Walsh’s multidimensional voyage and explore these illuminating insights we will, in my view, see through the frayed clothing of the ideas we often dress others up in allowing the truth of who the ‘other’ is to shine through.[2]

In After Ideology, from underneath the rubble of the civilizational atrophy provoked by the modern ideologies of the twentieth century, Walsh sets out a map of recovery charting out the existential core of an ascent traceable within the human spirit. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Eric Voegelin, in his view, ‘exemplify the cathartic resolution of the crisis that finally allows the possibility of transcending it’ (35). Then in The Growth of the Liberal Soul he called attention to how liberal politics, in fact, is ultimately dependent on such transcendent faith.[3] He asserted that liberal politics is ‘the translation of the transcendent worldview into the finite public realm’ (246). In The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence Walsh gave a masterclass in a magnificent transformational reading of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Kierkegaard. He saw them as inaugurating an existential shift away from a philosophical tradition concerned simply with the study of entities and concepts. Within these philosophers he finds an existential meditation on the transcendent horizon within which we find ourselves [xiii]. In his penultimate work Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being, he sought to further work on a retrieval of the missing link of the relational person, which he was already composing in his ongoing personalist symphony. Focusing on the human being is, Walsh believes, even restorative of the theoretical dignity of the political. He concludes, in fact, that ‘politics is most complete when it has become politics of the person’ [256].[4]

On the primacy of the person

So, in The Priority of the Person Walsh sets out various concrete instantiations of the ‘theory’ he has been working on during these years of investigation. In sixteen intellectually scintillating chapters, originally written as individual personalist essays, he outlines how if you want to address different questions like liberalism, the common good, the work of Eric Voegelin, or reflect on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Benedict XVI or the great financial crisis of 2008, the most accessible way is to inquire into ‘what it means to be a person’ [x]. This reminds us of Socrates’ approach on how a truly open enquiry entails asking Gorgias ‘who he is’ [Gorgias, 447d]. To Walsh the answer is not a definition but is constituted as an ‘imperative of living’ [22]. The beginning of the beginning is that ‘the person, each person, is prior to all else that is’ (ix). This is not a declaration of some kind of metaphysical dogma but a discovery to be made. And because each person is unique and unrepeatable, the encounter with this truth is to be made ever new in itself. It is an existential breakthrough-event and an ongoing happening. In Kierkegaardian fashion Walsh speaks of three stages in life where the discovery of the priority of the person occurs, that is, on the political, philosophical and historical dimensions of existence. The political is lived in the immediacy of lived experience; the philosophical stage involves us in the wonder of reflection on the already lived of the ‘not yet’ reality; and the historical aspect is the unfolding of these events which while remaining within space and time are not actually limited within the historical horizon.

Thus, the volume significantly begins with the political because this is where an initial breakthrough and differentiation occurs in terms of the discovery of the primacy of the person. In the political realm we are so to speak thrown into existence as human beings. We cannot postpone living or deciding since we have no time to ‘erect the principles by which a publicly representative order is affirmed’ (125). Here practice is ‘in advance of theoretical underpinnings’ which is not unusual since ‘reflection is always directed by what preexists it’ (6). Politics, in fact, is a response to the discovery that human beings have an ‘inner capacity for reflection.’ It is the Greeks who begin noticing these uniquely human capacities. But there are also other breakthroughs in the Hebrew prophets, the Confucian sages, and the enlightened bodhisattvas. In this cultural, intellectual and spiritual setting ‘the unique self-responsibility of the individual emerges’ and it becomes evident that ‘neither anointments nor appointments’ surpass ‘independent judgment and truth.’ Christianity too recognizes this personalistic reality but there is a constant struggle in its realization. In fact, Walsh argues that although this discovery occurs, it cannot be fully apprehended until the modern turn toward interiority. It is the case that our words and language often fail us and there is the need for an ‘intellectual and linguistic overhaul’ in order to make sense of the whole discovery (3). Walsh, in fact, does not simply refer to the linguistic shift required to account for the breakthrough, but his study is, I believe, an attempt to carry it out. He says we cannot ‘acknowledge the necessity of treating persons differently and then continue to speak of them in the language of things’ (18). In a Beckettian sense but without the opacity, David Walsh has a linguistic and intellectual gift which helps us move beyond the embarrassment of language, thereby allowing access to a more adequate treatment and expression of the mystery of the human person. In so doing he does not remain an embattled witness to ‘the churn of stale words within the heart’ but goes insightfully and with luminosity beyond them.[5] Commenting on ‘A New Understanding of Language Required’ Walsh explains how

“when a person expresses him- or herself [in words], the uppermost meaning is that of the person who exceeds what has been expressed. We might say that it is possible for human beings to express themselves because they never express themselves. Like God they remain hidden behind, yet present within, their creation. That incommunicability that ultimately characterizes the person can be known only through the capacity of persons to recognize what cannot be recognized in each of them. Only persons can know persons [83].”

Discoverable underlying personalist dimensions: widening our horizons

The study appears in the Notre Dame series ‘The Beginning and the Beyond of Politics’ whose aim is to investigate politics in the widest possible horizon. Walsh’s central contention is, in fact, that the liberal political order is not a ‘house of cards.’ With its recognition of the inviolable dignity of persons and defense of human rights we can catch a glimpse of ‘the inexhaustibility that each human being is.’ It is in this way that ‘what would otherwise be invisible, the infinity of the person, is rendered visible’ (7). The language of rights is after all an abbreviation for a far more extended knowledge of who the person is [29]. In the midst of an ongoing collapse of liberal faith evidenced in writers like Patrick Deneen and Richard Rorty, Walsh sets out a much more optimistic approach. Notwithstanding their inherent weaknesses, liberal democracies remain oases preserving an ordered world turned toward ‘the preservation of individual dignity and respect’ [31]. So, Walsh contends that there are essential fragments of coherence found within the liberal political order. Although liberal democracy may no longer know ‘the inspiration from which it lives,’ yet respect for ‘the dignity of the person is an oblique expression of reverence for that which is the source of human dignity’ [49].

The novelty in this book and indeed in Walsh’s writings overall is the way he reads political theorists, philosophers and writers with ‘new eyes.’ Brief reference can be made here, for example, to how he sees and peruses John Rawls, Søren Kierkegaard and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s contributions. Already in The Growth of the Liberal Soul Walsh pointed out how liberal intellectuals ‘are more in the manner of lost souls who carry within them the flickering sense of that for which they seek’ [51]. Indeed, the publication of Rawls’s A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith and his essay ‘On My Religion’ in 2009 were a revelation of ‘just how many of the main parameters of…[Rawls’s] philosophical thought were worked out within a theological-personalist horizon’ [The Priority of the Person, 104]. Walsh in a very original, seminal and transformational analysis of Rawls sketches out ‘the Christian personalism of his undergraduate thesis to the reasonable faith of his lectures on Kant’ [120]. Rawls’s ‘priority of the right over the good’ is based on a ‘personalist faith’ because when one lives by such a conviction ‘one has actualized a faith that affirms the person as more than one can say’ [120].

Kierkegaard is seen by the author as the culminating figure in the turn to the subject as the turn to the person of the modern philosophical revolution.  Walsh explains how Kierkegaard is, in fact, ‘the true originator of the philosophic movement known as “personalism”’ and yet he is not seen as being within their ranks. It is Kierkegaard who is the one

“who most thoroughly elaborates the interior movement by which…the person not only gains a foothold in the eternal, but becomes indeed the substantial reality that is its indispensable concomitant…The self is the self who not only expresses itself but binds itself”[225].

“The person is thereby a threshold crossing beyond being. Each human being is ‘the whole of being…each one stands outside of the whole of being… [and those] who know this already think within the horizon of the person” [233].

In an analysis of the historical breakthrough to the prioritization of the person, Walsh sees Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings, for example, as transformative and emblematic of how history is transmuted; it is not simply a record of ‘the whirling buzzing confusion’ of events [250]. History is not only, as R.G Collingwood remarks, ‘a scissors-and-paste affair,’ rather, its meaning can only be unfolded ‘within a wider drama’ in which the participants are a part [250]. Human beings are not just froth and bubble in a pre-determined stream of history. In his essay ‘Art and History in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel’ [257-268] Walsh points out how ‘we are not responsible for history, only for our actions within it’ [263]. Indeed, human beings offer fresh possibilities ‘by which a new beginning becomes possible’ [265]. Zinadia in November 1916, for instance, exemplifies how ‘history does not have to be the perpetual round of oppression, and further oppression’ [The Priority of the Person, 265]. She had seduced a married man, abandoned her dying mother, deserted her dying son for her lover. Nonetheless, in her personal confession [ see chapter seventy-five of November 1916] she acknowledges her own responsibility realizing that it is only by repentance and absolution that evil is overcome [266]. In her ‘self-giving’ act of repentance, history in itself unfolds, ‘toward every human being at its irreplaceable center’ [268]. Father Aloni whom she confesses to sets out the broader horizons we all act within. He says: ‘in each of us there is a mystery greater than we realize. And it is in communion with God that we are able to catch a glimpse of it.’[6] We can say that David Walsh’s works are a rediscovery, recovery and a glimpse of this dynamic ever creative core of the human being. As such his works search out to adequately account for the ‘in-between’ (metaxic) nature of the great drama of existence and in so doing he uncovers what it means ‘to be’ a person. This book review is limited and so it is just a glance at Walsh’s exceptional scholarly contribution. But the ongoing challenge for readers and scholars alike is to work towards a further expansion and development of the fertile horizons offered by the Walshian perspectives. The intellectual and spiritual task is to positively and critically participate in the breathtaking journey to the center of the person. We cannot, I argue, as Beckett says, merely continue to mouth stale old words and utter jaded shibboleths in our discussions. Thus, there is a need to articulate and use a new ‘personed’ language. We will only know what it is when we begin to speak it and so communicate. Walsh’s book might seem to some like Signposts in a Strange Land, but it could not be timelier in a world of pandemic when the question clearly emerges on all levels what is it ‘to be’ a human being.[7] In Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ Estragon says rather pessimistically to Vladimir ‘why don’t we hang ourselves?’ Vladimir asks, ‘with what?’  Estragon retorts ‘You haven’t got a piece of rope?’ Vladimir says ‘no.’ Estragon says, ‘then we can’t.’[8] So, in the end they see they have to go with who they are as persons and this is inclusive of all their concomitant weaknesses. Dare I say, in light of David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries that we too have to ‘pull on…[our] trousers…[and]… let’s go’ in the human-divine drama of the wonderful exploration of what it means to be a human person. Walsh is sure, as I am, it is a ‘hope [that] does not disappoint’ [303-323].

Notes

[1] (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 34.

[2] See Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 104.

[3] (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

[4] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016).

[5] ‘Cascando,’ The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett: A Critical Edition, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (New York: Grove Press, 2012), 57.

[6] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, November 1916: The Red Wheel, Knot II, tr. H.T Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 1000.

[7] Walker Percy, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).

[8] Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 87-88.

This was originally published in Clartitas, Journal of Dialogue & Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2020).

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