What is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions by John M. Rist (review)

In this book, John Rist engages a number of contemporary controversies and historical reflections about the human person. He also offers a development of what he calls the Mainline Tradition of reflection on the human person, which was built up from Greek philosophy and biblical theology. Thomas Aquinas's understanding of the person is a signal representative of this Mainline Tradition, a tradition that Rist argues was augmented and further perfected by Edith Stein. Against this Mainline Tradition, what could be called the Modern Tradition rejects God (and therefore the human imago dei), replaces the immaterial soul with mind as an epiphenomenon of matter, and considers autonomy to be the ground of human worth. John Locke's conception of a person as "a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places," is a textbook representative of this modern tradition. Rist writes with flair and authoritative expertise, especially about the ancient world in which the concept of a "person" did not play the central role that it came to occupy in the Christian West.

It is unexpected, therefore, that the treatment of Boethius, who gave to us perhaps the most canonical definition of person in the Mainline Tradition, an "individual substance of rational nature," does not receive an extensive treatment in this book. By contrast, Aquinas is rightly treated as a pivotal player. Rist appreciates Aquinas's view of a person but still considers it incomplete. The gaps in this view include a lack of an adequate and Augustinian appreciation of the role of history and autobiography (even if unwritten) in understanding an individual person as well as an overemphasis on matter as the cause of individuality.

Rist's compelling account of the undoing of the Mainline Tradition of the person begins with Scotus but intensifies with Descartes who holds "we can employ the material world as is appropriate to the nature of its individual parts and thus make ourselves 'masters and possessors of nature'. And since even the human body is non-mental, that too at least in theory is mere matter to be manipulated" (98). Locke continues the disintegration of the person by considering us as the owners of our bodies (an implicit body-self dualism), and by positing a concept of the person in terms of psychological properties with continuity over time. Persons are those who can be held responsible for their actions rather than individual members of a species. Later thinkers, such as Peter Singer, will use Locke's view of "person" in a radically new way. "Person" refers no longer to individuals who can be held responsible for their actions, but rather to individuals who are part of the moral community deserving of respect, fair treatment, and basic rights.

Once the person is understood as a collection of psychological qualities such as memories and desires, the person is inherently a bundle ever in flux, for these psychological qualities change, indeed can change quite radically. In David Hume we find "both God and soul absent, the older concept of the person, painstakingly built up over centuries, has more or less disappeared" (125). If a "person" is a bundle of thoughts, desires, and memories, which are always in flux, personal responsibility may likewise be unstable. With a humor that makes its appearance frequently in the book, Rist writes, "A man declines to pay his debt because he is now not the person who incurred it. At this point, however, the lender gets angry and strikes his debtor, and when the other complains, tells him that he is not the same person who struck the blow" (31).

Yet the moral, legal, and political order require stability of persons as well as a ground for respect for persons. Aspects of the Mainline concept of person are expressed in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to...