Reconstructing Humanity – Part 2: What is Human Identity?

In this series I am looking at the act of deconstruction and juxtaposing it against a constructive view of humanity. The constructive view of humanity I am proposing is a theological view of human persons. It is seeing human persons in light of their Divine Creator: the One who puts the theos in theology.

A Word About Theology in Context

This theological view of what it means to be a human person is by no means novel. In fact I scorn novelty, as should we all. At least, we should scorn novelty for novelty’s sake. But hating novelty is already a position that stands in glaring contrast to the current spirit of the age and radical deconstruction. Nevertheless, any worthwhile view has its historical predecessors and a time-worn tradition. This counts for deconstruction theories just as much as any other. There are few true nihilists in the world, and, if there are such nihilists, what exactly would they write about and why?

The best “new” theology, therefore, is always a re-articulation of the old, just in the context of new or dynamic circumstances. It may be true what the classicist Julius Hare wrote in his 1867 Guesses at Truth, that

Goethe in 1800 does not write just as Shakespeare wrote in 1600: but neither would Shakespeare in 1800 have written just as he wrote in 1600. For the frame and aspect of society are different; the world which would act on him, and on which he would have to act, is another world.

Julius Hare, Guesses at Truth, quoted in Stephen Prickett “An Ache in the Missing Limb: Biblical Origins of English Literary Criticism” (40).

Nevertheless, that Shakespeare would have written differently in a different (later) cultural context, does not mean that what he wrote in 1600 is not as valid or as true as it was in 1800. It only means he might have had to express those same truths differently had he lived in 1800. He might have had to amend his poetic form and the frame of his works but not the inherent meaning of the sentences he penned. And so it is with any theological writing as well. Chasing novelty is for the foolish, the arrogant or the dumb.

Deconstruction Revisited

I argue, therefore, that the process of deconstruction is itself not only a universal human act but an act that ultimately points to other truths about all humans. These other truths are, in turn, not deconstructable. If you like, they are indestructible. This does not mean that we always are aware of these truths. Nor does it mean we cannot suppress them and pretend they are not the truth. It only means that, in virtue of being true, they are unchangeable over time and apply universally regardless of cultural differences.

Deconstruction, therefore, need not be an infinite regress of interpretations that never lands anywhere. It is not an endless process of asking “yeah, but who says?” Unless, of course, one desires it to be so. Instead, deconstructing narratives opens us up to fixed and foundational truths that those narratives agree on or point to. We can all recognize these foundations if we approach the process of deconstruction with wisdom and humility. The first foundational truth to acknowledge before considering some concrete examples of our shared humanity is human identity itself.

This article discusses how both the modern, scientific view and the post-modern, social view of identity, while helpful, ultimately do not grasp the true mystery and inherent value of human identity. Instead, it is a pre-modern, ontological status that grounds the irreducible mystery and innate value of human identity. That status is the metaphysical fact that all humans being are made in the image of a Creator.

The Modern Narrative: The Scientific Story

In C.S. Lewis’ classic tale of conversion, The Pilgrim’s Regress, one of the characters, young Mr. Enlightenment (conceived of as Freud), throws the hero John into a pit dug into the side of a mountain. A giant, The Spirit of the Age, lives on the mountaintop and his gaze penetrates through the very flesh of the prisoners trapped in the cavernous prison:

John lay in his fetters all night in the cold and stench of the dungeon. And when morning came there was a little light at the grating, and, looking round, John saw that he had many fellow prisoners, of all sexes and ages. But instead of speaking to him, they all huddled away from the light and drew as far back into the pit, away from the grating, as they could. But John thought that if he could breathe a little fresh air he would be better, and he crawled up to the grating. But as soon as he looked out and saw the giant, it crushed the heart out of him: and even as he looked, the giant began to open his eyes and John, without knowing why he did it, shrank from the grating.

Now I dreamed that the giant’s eyes had this property, that whatever they looked on became transparent. Consequently, when John looked round into the dungeon, he retreated from his fellow prisoners in terror, for the place seemed to be thronged with demons. A woman was seated near him, but he did not know it was a woman, because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins: and lower down the lungs panting like sponges, and the liver, and the intestines like a coil of snakes. And when he averted his eyes from her they fell on an old man, and this was worse for the old man had a cancer. And when John sat down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of his own inwards.

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress

In this passage Lewis describes with unparalleled imagery what philosophers might call the 3rd-person perspective of the human person. Science, in impersonal objectivity, sees man only as an organism, a biological entity reducible to its basic, anatomical parts. Man is DNA and impersonal matter. People are mere molecules in motion. The Spirit of the Age in the story of John is Modernism. More particularly, it is the Scientism which was birthed out of the Enlightenment, which crowned Reason as the sole source of knowledge.

This Scientism reached its pinnacle in the 1940’s and 50’s with the mature thought of the logical positivists, whose famous maxim stated what could not be verified by scientific investigation was essentially meaningless. Man is, or was, the sum total of his biological parts. These parts could be exhaustively described in a scientific idiom. Beyond that there was nothing more to say, no other story to tell. This is the 3rd-person perspective. What we can speak of in 3rd-person terms is all we can say of anything and is the only thing that counts as truth. Joe and Jane’s humanity is fully exhausted once we have exhaustively described their physical parts: their height, weight, hair color, bone structure, etc. There is no “I” there to speak of, only an “it.”

What went on inside a man’s “soul,” the first-person perspective of conscious life, the stuff of human experience, is at most an epiphenomena of the raw matter of a highly evolved brain. Brains just churn out things like moral sensibilities, longings, desires and feelings of transcendence. Scientific analysis could ultimately explain away all of these deep features of humanity. Or so the story went.

There are very few hard core modernists left. Logical Positivism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own criteria. Further, the new existentialism of the 20th century, the emerging global cry for social justice and even the dawn of the New Age religions all mitigated against Scientism’s notion that man can be reduced to the totality of his physical parts. By the time new atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens tried to popularize what men like Ayers, Feigl and Schlick had done in the academy a generation before, the intellectual ground had already shifted under their feet. As such, their reign was quite short.

No, we are more than biological machines, even if we are very sophisticated ones at that. Perhaps, instead, we are more like social constructs, projects and products of the cultures in which we reside.

The Post-Modern Narrative: The Story of Social Theory

Critical theorists skeptical of the scientistic view of human persons turned toward social identity and our first-person experience of that identity as the hallmark of human personhood. Karl Marx, for example, saw all of human history through this lens of socially constructed identity groups, groups pitted against each other in a progressive battle over power, wealth and privilege. The question before us then is whether this view of humanity or human personhood is better than its predecessor and whether it suffices to explain who or what we are.

On this social identity view, social location determines what one is. By “social location,” I mean what most critical theorists mean, the construction of a personal or group identity based upon certain social features and conditions in which an individual body resides. These would be features like race, economic class, gender, religious affiliation, etc. None of these features are themselves substantive, they too are just constructed realities. Thus, when critical theorists refer to human persons apart from their socially constructed features, they often refer to them simply as “bodies.” People are socialized bodies.

For many social theorists, who are atheists or agnostics about religious or metaphysical claims, human identity just is what the individual can be reduced to socially. That socially constructed identity may be partially chosen, but is also, in part, imposed upon particular bodies. As Julius Hare pointed out in 1867, the world acts on the person as the person acts on the world in which he resides. For critical theorists this interplay does not just affect the aesthetic production of the artist, it makes or creates the artist herself.

Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor implied this social view of identity in a 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley:

Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences. In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life. My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul.

Here, Sotomayor affirms that identity is both imposed upon her by an external entity (fortunately for her a loving family) while also being freely chosen. Her choice to love and live a certain way is what determines her being Latina.

In a seminal article on anti-essentialism in Feminist theory, legal scholar Angela Harris also describes this sense of the individual human body as a amalgam of vying social features: