The human being is identified in the West as an individual and from this concept stem the individual rights codified into human rights legislation and the market economy that works on the basis we are rational agents. The sense of autonomy that underpins liberal values also depends on the human being conceived of as an individual.
There are many implications from regarding humans as autonomous units. This way of viewing us was not always so natural as it seems. A process of atomisation and objectification took place in the West, linked to changes in metaphysics, the development of scientific methodology and the growth in technology. Closely linked to the process of objectification, the atomisation of individualism leads us to see ourselves as self-contained units surrounded by a world not of encounter, but one of objective data ripe for exploitation as standing reserve. And the more we exploit through techne, the more isolated and atomised we become - stuck on our mobile telephones not encountering what is around us. This is where individualism leads and in the process greatly diminishes our capacity for empathy. The self-contained atom is a deeply reductive view of the human being - a mere consumer or subject of political power.
Much as we lost some connection with Scripture when it was translated from the more expressive Greek into the more legalistic Latin, so our way of defining the human being is too Latinised. The individual is the indivisible unit, who by dint of being indivisible is also a self-contained and self-sufficient autonomous agent. There is another way to describe the human being and that is as a person.
While “individual” is linked to the Latin etymological root for the indivisible, “person” comes from the Greek “prosopon”, meaning to face towards. Thus in the very definition of the person, he is relational and not autonomous. This is a very important difference. It means the human being exists in relationship, not as an autonomous unit and what atomises us does not free us, but diminishes our humanity.
In his seminal work, A Secular Age, Canadian Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes between the understanding of self in the enchanted Mediaeval world and the disenchanted and secular world of modernity. Mediaeval Man saw himself as porous, but in modernity Man is a buffered self. What this means is that the human being in the Mediaeval world was porous to cosmic forces, angelic and demonic. He was thus relational both vertically and horizontally with his community. Modern Man is the buffered self, autonomous and protected from external forces and thus his world becomes disenchanted and he therefore becomes alienated and atomised.
Perhaps the darkest definition of Hell was articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he said “Hell is other people”. This is a statement of the atomisation of the atheist West. Other people are an imposition to the buffered self that does not relate, but might (like Sartre) indulge in totalitarian Marxist fantasies of imposed community while not belonging to his own parish or village.
An Orthodox perspective on the person comes from the leading Greek Orthodox theologian, Christos Yannaras. For him the human person, using Heideggerian language is always a being-towards, not an isolated and atomised thing. Individualism is, for Yannaras the consequence of the Fall and the life under the curse of death. Existence becomes a struggle for individual survival, not life in communion, more in accordance with Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” than the Gospel. Yannaras writes:
“For Orthodox theology, the fall of man takes place when he freely renounces his possibility of participating in true life, in personal relationship and loving communion - the only possibility for man to be as a hypostasis of personal distinctiveness. The fall arises out of man’s free decision to reject personal communion with God and restrict himself to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his own nature.”
And this fall leads to a fragmentation whereby the natural needs of man turn into enslaving passions - leading to death. And now Man living under this curse of death brought about by autonomy leads to an inescapable ancestral sin:
“For nature does not exist except as personal hypostases, and the first man identified the fact of his existence, not with the personal distinctiveness of his natural hypostasis, but with its survival and self-existence. Thus each new human person is born subject to his individual nature’s need to survive as existential autonomy. He is born condemned to be the bearer of an individual or natural will subordinated to the absolute need for survival.”
Yannaras thus contrasts the existence of the person in communion with the diminished and post-lapsarian life of the autonomous individual. The person relates to the Trinitarian God - three divine Persons or hypostases in relationship.
In the secular West there is a great deal of emphasis on individual autonomy as the expression of authenticity. Once we realise the human being is a person this ceases to be a credible perspective. As much as he attempts to assert his freedom the individual becomes a slave to his passions. Many of the expressions of individuality in the form of New-Age tattoos or following particular subcultures simply amounts to becoming absorbed in a new collective identity that does not embody any higher meaning, but is simply cliched and participation in what Heidegger would call the “they self”.
Yannaras places emphasis on personal distinctiveness and irrepeatability as the key aspects of the person. By contrast the individual is humanity reduced to repeatable atom, driven by passions and in his very autonomy no longer sovereign. This personal distinctiveness of Yannaras's person is something like that which we term in common parlance, the personality.
We derive the word “personality” from the person. Our personality exists in relation to others, not in isolation. And once we are isolated we cease to empathise with the other’s personality. Another word derived from person is of course “persona”. Again, looking at modern secular ideas of authenticity, the word “persona” linked as it is to the word mask, is seen as suspect and inauthentic. That though is because we are thinking of it within the paradigm of modern individualism. A mask has important ritualistic and social functions. In his work on ethno-sociology, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin looks back to the most primitive culture and the role of the persona in ritual and social meaning. For primitive societies the individual was not a concept. The individual, as Nietzsche explained, is a very modern idea.
Dugin explained the role of the persona thus:
“It is significant that the Greek word for 'persona' or 'person' literally means mask. In the ethnos, everything is a mask. The structure of ethnic being is personified. Ethnic thought does not question who the mask conceals or whom the mask indicates. ‘Personality’ is a moment of ethnic noesis and possesses qualities but no substances.”
The persona exists only in the ethnic context, only in communal meaning. Clearly, as Dugin’s work shows, tracing the shift from ethnos, to people, to nation, we are not in that same cultural existence now. Nonetheless, it teaches how the persona can only exist in a non-individualist communal way. Clearly each persona performs a ritualised and socially determined role.
That though is the most authentic form of existence. The shaman is gone, but it is when we perform socially-defined roles today, such as husband or father, wife or mother, that we find our personal distinctiveness and therefore true freedom. We are no longer drifting atoms, buffeted by our passions, but real people.
As Yannaras, using Heideggerian language, explains:
“Beings are [einai) only as phenomena, only insofar as they become accessible to a referential relation of disclosure. We cannot speak of the being-in-itself of beings; we can only speak of being-there or being-present (par-einai), of co-existence with the possibility of their disclosure. We know beings as presence (par-ousia), not as essence (ousia).”
Both the Palamite and Heideggerian undertones here are noticeable. Dasein itself is disclosed through its energy, not its substance. And here we are at the heart of Yannaras’s argument about the person. It all hinges on the Palamite distinction, but not separation, between energy and essence (ousia). We encounter the personality through its energy. And we encounter God through His energy. Yannaras famously refers to how we can recognise a piece of newly-heard Mozart from another composer’s work because of the energy of Mozart’s personality.
With Yannaras we avoid the univocity of Being of the Franciscan schoolmen. God is not simply the biggest autonomous Being and we the smaller autonomous beings - despots within our own boundaries of Nozik individualism. No, with Yannaras we turn to apophaticism and with the help of Heidegger understand the following:
“As the refutation of exclusively conceptual affirmation of God and of the practical necessity of God [Niezschean as per Heidegger} nihilism stands for a radical denial of the ‘conceptual idols’ of God, and as the unrestricted limit to questioning it offers further possibilities of rescuing the divinity of God.”
For Yannaras Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s nihilism consigns metaphysical accounts of God, the God of the philosophers, to the realm of defeated ideas thereby opening us to the possibility that God is or is not. For Yannaras this can lead to apophatic knowledge as personal participation.
Once freed from the conceptual constraints of metaphysics and rationalism the human being can again engage with God as a person. One might say the person is Being-towards- God through communion.
As individuals in our fallen and atomised state we rebelliously verify and conceptualise. When reconnected with our personhood we do not adopt such hubristic Cartesian methods. For Yannaras we are freed from this prison by Christ’s Incarnation, the second Person of the Trinity - the relational Godhead. He unites the human and the divine in communion through his Theanthropic nature as the God Man.
Life in the Church leads to a personal knowledge through participation, not fallen subjective and reductive knowledge. It is the encounter with the energy of God, which is articulated in catholic knowledge.
In this sense the rediscovery of the human being as a person not an individual leads to a re-established relationship with God. However, this can only happen through Christ, because Christ became incarnate. We were trapped in the paradigm of the individual and of autonomous survival. Christ changes that and recapitulates our existence as a personal existence of communion.
To return to the atheist existentialist Sartre, Yannaras has an answer for his famous misanthropic comment, by turning to Dostoevsky:
“Before Sartre, Dostoevsky had already defined hell in a similar way but more fully, summarising the theological teaching on hell of the Orthodox tradition: ‘Hell is the torment of not loving.’ It becomes evident from this definition that ‘other people’ are the occasion of my own hell, although the cause lies in my own inability to relate to them, in my imprisonment in the egocentric autonomy of atomic individuality, in my own ‘freedom’. Hell is therefore all the more tormenting when the ‘other’ is not an atomic individual at a distance from me who nullifies the possibility of relation, but is a person who presents himself to me as a living ecstasy of self-offering and calls me to a fulfilling communion and relation for me remains unattainable. This inability to relate, the punishment of someone not loving, is the ultimate failure of existence which summarises the Church’s teaching on eternal punishment. It is not God who is the punisher and creator of hell.”
Therefore, to be reduced to autonomous individuals from relational persons who can participate in God’s energy, is not simply a difference in terminology, but the road to Hell.
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