Religion, self and neuroscience: A new personalism
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2020
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Religion, Neuroscience and the Self
A New Personalism
Patrick McNamara
2020, Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
ISBN: 978-0-367-02896-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-00107-9 (ebk)
Boethius noted that a person is an individual substance of a rational nature, thus summarizing the classical view of Reason as indissolubly linked to the individual consciousness and the personal. In this work, I revive that view of the link between the personal and Reason by showing that at the heart of the personal is what the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition called the agent intellect or roughly the power a person has to imaginatively abstract universals from intelligible forms; to creatively bring possible ideas and worlds into existence; to discern/establish the communal/ecclesial nature of its own activity and to discern the uniqueness or haecceity of any given existent, including one’s self and other persons. The agent intellect is more than just the intellectual activity of an agent, it also creates the sense of an intentional unity in consciousness, such that my first-person perspectival experience is co-intentional with others, and is experienced as creative, free, inviolate, and my own. I argue that this sense of the personal as rooted in the agent intellect is a major biocultural achievement of both the Aristotelian-Catholic tradition and the modern age, but it is under severe threat by cultural trends hostile to Reason, the person and genuine community. I then argue that we need a new form of personalism to protect this expanded idea of Reason as well as the gains made in personal consciousness. I draw on both neuroscientific and theological resources to sketch out the key contours of this new personalism and call it “eschatological personalism”. What eschatological personalism adds to the traditional personalist paradigm is the rooting of the personal in the agent intellect and situating the essence of the personal in its End, or ultimate fulfillment--the eschaton. Only an eschatological personalism has any chance of rising to the 21st-century challenges of intolerant secularizing cultures, the reign of hedonistic individualism, the soft totalitarian surveillance regimes (of both the left and the right), super-intelligent Artificial Intelligent or AI machines, autonomous weapons of mass destruction, global ecological collapse, mass population transfers, and late modern globalized capitalism".
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Pedagogía, Artes y Humanidades