Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism by Robert P. George

Author:Robert P. George [George, Robert P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Political Science, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781504036450
Google: ZGLXCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29740325
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

TRANSGENDERISM, “MARRIAGE EQUALITY,” AND LIBERALISM’S TRAGIC ERROR

The idea that human beings are nonbodily persons inhabiting nonpersonal bodies never quite goes away. Although the mainstream of Christianity long ago rejected it, what is sometimes described as “body-self dualism” is back with a vengeance, and its followers are legion. Whether in the courts, on campus, or at boardroom tables, it significantly shapes the expressive individualism and social liberalism that are dominant among elites.

Christianity’s rejection of body-self dualism answered the challenge to orthodoxy posed by what was known as “Gnosticism.” Gnosticism was composed of many ideologies, some ascetical, others quite the opposite. What they held in common was an understanding of the human being—an anthropology—that sharply divides the material or bodily, on one hand, and the spiritual or mental, on the other. For Gnostics, it was the immaterial, the mental, that ultimately mattered. Applied to the human person, this view entails that the material or bodily is inferior—if not a prison to escape, certainly a mere instrument to be manipulated to serve the goals of the “person,” understood as the spirit or mind or psyche. The self is a spiritual or mental substance; the body, its merely material vehicle. You and I are identified entirely with the spirit or mind or psyche, and not at all (or in only the most highly attenuated sense) with the bodies that we occupy (or are somehow “associated with”) and use.

Against such dualism, Christianity asserted a view of the human person as a dynamic unity: a personal body, a bodily self. This rival vision suffuses the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian teaching. Aristotle, who broke with his teacher Plato on the point, defends one form of this “hylomorphism,” as it has come to be called. Without denying the existence of the soul, it affirms that the human person is a material being (though not merely material). We do not just inhabit our bodies; we are our bodies, whatever else we are. The living body, far from being our external instrument, is part of our personal reality. So while it cannot exist apart from the soul—which is its substantial form—the body is not inferior. It shares in our personal dignity. The idea of the soul as the substantial form of the body is orthodox Christianity’s alternative to the heretical conception of the soul as a “ghost in the machine.” One can separate living body from soul in analysis but not in fact; we are body-soul composites.

So we are animals—rational animals, to be sure, but not pure minds or intellects. Our personal identity across time consists in the endurance of the animal organisms we are. From this follows a crucial proposition: the human person comes to be when the human organism does, and survives—as a person—until the organism ceases to be.

We are, again, not brute animals but animals with a rational nature—organized from the start to develop and exercise rational powers. We have the capacities for conceptual thought and for practical deliberation, judgment, and choice. These powers are not reducible to the purely material.

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