Surrogates

INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR SURROGATES

5. INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR SURROGATES Each human is a singular being that owns and uses its character and habits when expressing itself in and through a person, a lived body, and an organism. As pointed out earlier (in chapter 3), that owner-user has sometimes been identified as a soul, with a divine origin, responsible for what it does with its body, and for the life it leads. Even those who speak most confidently of it as an immortal, divinely produced owner and user, hesitate to credit it to an embryo, or even to an evidently visible being, still within the mother’s body. Thomas Aquinas thought that God waited a week before he inserted a soul into a male’s body, and waited still longer before he inserted one into a female’s. None of his followers apparently advocates baptizing the unborn. No satisfactory warrants have ever been given for maintaining that humans are no more than complexes of physical units, only living beings, or only socialized entities. In their speech and in their acts, sooner or later, and at least tacitly, all take each living human being to have a person, a lived body, and an organism. To deny the first is to leave the mind, will, hope, memory, and desire without a common source. To deny the second is to deny that a human can function as a sign, and play a role in the humanized world. To deny the third is to deny that one eats, drinks, grows, and decays in a domain where one’s organism is together with other organisms. No one, of course, is three beings somehow alongside of one another, often acting in some accord. All three are owned and used by the same individual , sometimes with an emphasis on one or two of them. In its absence , the three would just happen to be together for a while, neither owned nor used. There would then be no user of any of them as a surrogate for the others. Although I am often aware of myself as a person, and though my mind is a subdivision of this, I do not understand either very well. I do, though, know some of the things I can do as a person—think, believe, sympathize, will, hope, fear, desire, love, condemn, despise, sympathize, remember, expect , and plan—as well as some of the social things expected of me as a lived body, and some of the ways that enable my organism to function well. Other humans, like me, are singulars who own and express themselves in and through their persons, lived bodies, and organisms. Paradoxically, I sometimes feel more confident about what I claim to know about some other humans than I am about what I claim to know about myself, all the while that I think that I often know when they have misconstrued my acts, misinterpreted my intentions, or failed to reach or understand my singular being. When speaking to others, or sympathizing with them, each of us moves toward their singular beings in convergent, intensive moves. Others, again and again, refer to themselves as circling from the termini of their expressions toward themselves as sources of them. Again and again, they find their self-awareness to be less, but also sometimes more reliable than what others report to have discerned of them. Although we are unable to arrive at any singular as it is apart from all its expressions, or as having subjected what is received, through its person, lived body, or organism, to a final unification, there is nothing else that could be properly identified as our singular centers. Not an unknowable thing-in-itself, that singular is present, but in a less intensive form throughout all its expressions. Like Being itself, it is a reality that is never completely isolable from that which it accepts or expresses. To be is to be a unity. To be is to unify. To be is to be receptive to a plurality of expressions, and to be able to express itself in diverse ways. The arts provide splendid means by which we become alerted to the depths of things, well below what can be expressed in flat-footed prose or commonplace presentations. Only some things tempt us to abandon what is in focus for what we take to promise greater benefits, if only we accept what they provide or what they make accessible. We are rarely so complacent that we act only to overcome...