Figures in the Carpet: A Sampling

January/February 2007 · Historically Speaking 25 Figures in the Carpet. A Sampling PUBUSHED BY WILLIAM B. EERDMANS IN DECEMBER OF 2006, Figures in the Carpet is the result of a uniqueprojectin colhborative scholarship supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts: a multidisciplinary inquiry into the nature andconceptof "the humanperson. "As such, this collection of essays has about it the spirit of an extended conversation on matters that, while of intense and abiding interest, are often tacitlypresumed oreven ignoredin much of ourschokrly discourse. The seventeen topics addressedin the book span a wide spectrum, rangingfrom art historian Sally Promey's searching examination of thepresentation of self in early New Englandmaterialculture to EugeneMcCarraher's critique of the quasi-religious "socialselfhood"promoted byAmerican managementtheory, andfrom legalhistorian Charles Reid's treatmentof changingviews aboutthe handling of the bodies of the dead to Christine Rosen's examination of changing marital mores and Christopher Shannon 's exploration of the link betweenpersonhood and suffering in the works of Ivan Illich. But, despite theirvariety, the essays have a common concern with the changing historicalcontours , andenduringimportance, of whatwe mean by the humanperson, both as a historical agent and as an object of study. Here are six brief excerptsfrom representative essays: From Self to Person—Some Preliminary Thoughts WilfredM. McClay Our age, of course, speaks of selves and not souls. The latter is considered a term too laden widi metaphysical implications to pass dirough postmodern customs. But it is striking to note how poorly the word "self," even diough it is one of the cardinal terms of our discourse, serves us as a marker for that thread of essential continuity in the individual life that we acknowledge and commemorate in something so commonplace as an obituary. An obituary is not, or not only, about a "self." The "self" is too changeable and contingent and interior a thing for that, and too tied to a romantic and subjective view of the isolated and autonomous individual, to tell us adequately about the individual in die full panoply of his or her relations with odiers. The self is a movable and malleable target, one that adapts to changing circumstances, revising its constitution repeatedly over the course of an individual life, taking on strikingly different colorations at different times. And it is, in some fundamental way, unreachable. It divides so as to be unconquered. For although much of modern thought places heavy emphasis on the act of introspection, it assigns what is frankly a near-impossible task, for the self always manages to elude any final examination—mere being always another self that, as die ground of die examination, is not itself examinable. (And perhaps a "higher self" that one already is, in a sense, and yet diat one also aspires to conform oneself to.) To add to die complexity , die self can even be thought of as somediing diat, within die termini of an individual life, bodi comes into being, as in die psychological development of a very young child, and ceases to exist, as in cases of severe dementia or other mental impairment Yet even when a sense of "self" seems to have departed entirely from an individual we know—and diis disappearance itself is often hard to ascertain, since the self is so irreducibly a subjective and interior phenomenon, and is so remarkably protean and resilient—there is something else diat remains. What is one to call it? That somediing else is far better described by die term "person." It is the person, not merely the self, diat we attempt to capture in the obituary. It is the person, not the self, diat is not only die home address of our consciousness, but the nexus of our social relations, the chief object of our society's legal protections, the bearer of its political rights, and the communicant in its religious life. To put it another way, it is the person, not the self, whose nature is inextricably bound up in die web of obligations and duties that characterize our actual lives in history. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppmsca07398 ]. The concept of the "self," so steeped for us in romantic individualism, once seemed die most...