How to Know Thyself
By Rod Dreher — Director of Publications
What is a person? And why does it matter how we answer that question?
Christian Smith, one of America’s leading sociologists, has devoted much of his career to the search in the context of social science. In his new book, appropriately titled What Is A Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up, the Notre Dame University scholar offers comprehensive, innovative answers that just might re-orient the entire discipline of sociology.
Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff praised Smith’s book for raising “fundamental questions about the understanding of the person in social science that many thinkers either want to ignore or are content to say mindless things about.” In its pages, Smith argues that sociologists have been too quick to dismiss or to minimize the importance of subjectivity in their analysis of human beings.
“Many, if not most, sociological theories operate with an emaciated view of the person running in the background, models that are grossly oversimplified,” Smith says. Meanwhile, sociologists are going about living their own personal lives with often a very different view of humanity in mind. The science does not live up to the reality.”
“I think this is often driven not by the needs of real science, but by a kind of insecure scientism,” he continues. “The former is ultimately interested in knowing what is real and how it works, however complex that might turn out to be. The latter, especially in the social sciences, is often mostly concerned to imitate the science of an entirely different sphere of reality, such as physics, which never turns out well.”
(A full transcript of Smith’s interview with the Templeton Report is available here.)
Smith’s model of the human person offers an alternative to positivism—in this context, the belief that everything about the human person can be explained in terms of biological processes—and relativism, which here means the idea that there is no such thing as fixed aspects of human nature. Somewhere between pure objectivity and radical subjectivity lives the human person, in Smith’s view—it’s a third model which he calls “critical realist personalism.”
This theory places special emphasis on humans as purpose-driven beings—which, if true, has important consequences for social science, and science in general. This is why our definition of the human person matters.
“Different views of human personhood will provide us with different scientific interests, different professional moral and ethical sensibilities, different theoretical paradigms of explanation, and, ultimately, different visions of what comprises a good human existence which science ought to serve,” he says. “In this sense, science is never autonomous or separable from basic questions of human personal being, existence, and interest.
“If we get our view of personhood wrong, we run the risk of using science to achieve problematic, even destructively bad things. Good science must finally be built upon a good understanding of human personhood.”
This conflicts with the common view that proper science requires total objectivity, setting aside what Smith calls “ordinary ways of understanding.” In fact, Smith places himself on the side of the great philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, who taught that all knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is irreducibly personal.
“Good science never fully brackets persons or personhood as threatening to ‘objectivity’ or ‘universalism,’” he says. “Good science is always rooted in and grows out of profoundly personal engagements with, knowledge of, and love for the world and for truth.”
Smith, who is also the executive director of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Research, builds a social-science case for human dignity based in part on the fact that love—which he defines as “self-expenditure for the genuine good of others”—is a common part of the human experience. A word so freighted with emotion makes many social scientists nervous, Smith concedes, but no truthful account of the human person can afford to dismiss love.
“If it turns out that our theories and methods are not good at that, then that is our theories’ and methods’ fault, and certainly does not justify ignoring the centrality of love for understanding human social life, growth, and experience,” he says.
Funding for the research behind What Is A Person? came in part from a planning grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Kimon Sargeant, the Foundation’s vice president for human sciences, points out that the late Sir John Templeton had a keen interest in studying love scientifically.
“Sir John believed that scientific research could help us better understand the reality and significance of spiritual principles such as love and purpose,” Sargeant says. “Christian Smith’s pioneering social science work compels us to confront the primacy of love as an essential element of the human person. It can’t be theorized out of existence. What saints and poets have long known, social scientists may begin to understand too.”
Uncovering 'Hidden Gifts'
Stephen G. Post’s book The Hidden Gifts of Helping recently debuted on the Wall Street Journal’s hardcover philosophy bestseller list. Dr. Post teaches preventive medicine and medical ethics at Stony Brook University, and is president of the Templeton-supported Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. He is also a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation. Hidden Gifts explores how generosity, compassion, and hope help people survive hard times. As Publisher’s Weekly said in a rave review, “Post’s work is more than a feel-good read. It’s today’s handbook for survival.”
The Language of Genetics
As geneticists continue to unravel the mysteries of the natural world, their work will inevitably raise new questions that will fascinate both scientist and layman alike. How much, for example, should we tinker with the human genome? Are we prisoners of our genes? If so, does that subvert the notion that life has some ultimate meaning or purpose? In The Language of Genetics, Denis Alexander offers a very useful overview of this field, designed to provide any curious person the scientific knowledge they need in order to thoughtfully consider these kinds of questions that so easily veer off into philosophical and theological territory. Alexander is a JTF trustee and advisor and the director of the Faraday Institute at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge. The Language of Genetics is the seventh title in the Templeton Science and Religion Series and was published this month by Templeton Press.
