Jesus and Creativity by Kaufman Gordon D

Author:Kaufman, Gordon D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

III

With this developmental picture of our humanness in mind, we are in a position to turn to the question of responsible agency and creativity; and that will bring us closer to an understanding of what such comprehensive symbols as God and Jesus are all about. We rarely, if ever, talk about animals (or computers!) “taking responsibility” for a given situation or action, though we are well aware that animals are able to “care for” their young, can be taught to behave in ways required by humans (as a result of housebreaking of pets, for example), and can learn to “obey” many different sorts of human commands. Though we may say that we hold our dog “responsible” for having made a mess in the kitchen, it would seem a little odd to say the dog ought to “take responsibility” for this sort of problem. Taking responsibility is an extraordinarily complicated sort of action that perhaps only the human brain can manage. One must have acquired a number of complex skills and abilities (with their respective feedback mechanisms) and have learned how to manage all of these in concert when contemplating a future course of action for which one is willing to hold oneself responsible.9 Many animals have the capacity to seek necessary or desirable goals (for example, to search for food, engage in mating, make nests, travel great distances without getting lost), and that suggests their possession of something like rudimentary forms of what in humans develop into self-conscious attention and intention. But to “take responsibility” for what we are doing or are attempting to do, we need a good deal more than the capacity to seek desirable goals.

We must, for example, be able to imagine the future—that is, imagine what is not now the case and thus not present in our experience. Indeed, we must be able to imagine more or less simultaneously a number of diverse possible futures among which we might choose as we contemplate alternative actions that could be undertaken. For such imagining to be possible, we must have acquired a complex but manageable symbol/image system in terms of which we can represent to ourselves these diverse alternatives. This is ordinarily made available to humans as we acquire a complex language in the early years of life, a language that, above all, has first-person words such as “I,” “me,” “mine,” “we,” “us.” First-person terms all have self-reflexiveness built into them. In saying “I” or “me” a speaker is paying attention and calling attention to himself or herself (along with whatever else it is that he or she is saying). In learning to say “I” (at about the age of two years) we were beginning to distinguish ourselves clearly from things other than ourselves—from all those things with which the “I” enables us to contrast ourselves. Thus, we began to bring about (create) what is called “self-consciousness.” (Similarly with “we” and “us” and “our”—words which enable us to be aware of ourselves as participating members of specific groups.)10

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