Reading Note: Persons
Looking for a book yesterday, I came across one that I hadn’t even opened, much less begun to read: Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. It was immediately clear that this was a book that I ought to have looked into a while ago, and, retiring with it to my reading chair, I was soon so engrossed that I forgot all about updating the Daily Office. I have never seriously considered reading Frankenstein, the first of Mr Mendelson’s choices, but his chapter on the novel left me feeling something of a booby. Right now, though, I want to share a paragraph from his introduction. Because it could serve as a mission statement for this Web log, I wish I’d said it myself.
One of the themes of this book is its argument that the most intellectually and morally coherent way of thinking about human beings is to think of them as autonomous persons (the plural noun “persons,” not the collective noun “people”) instead of as members of any category, class or group. A second theme, inseparable from the first, is that persons exist only in relations with other persons, that the idea of an absolutely isolated and independent person is intellectually and morally incoherent, that all ideas of personality and society that emphasize stoicism and self-reliance are at best only partially valid, while ideas that emphasize mutual need and mutual aid have the potential to be true.
Like Mr Mendelson, my perspective lies between that of the soul-stuck solipsism of individualism viewpoint and the mechanical oversimplification of collectivism. I am not ashamed to label this perspective socialist. Whatever the political connotations of that term, it correctly denotes the focus of my values: mutual need and mutual aid, distributed in the society with which I’m familiar, which happens to include folks at many socio-economic levels.