Personalism

I have long thought that personalism is an ideal conceptual or philosophical 'vehicle' for expressing per-personal (and thus pro-animal) sentiments conceptually, abstractly, philosophically.  The later Peter A. Bertocci, a well-known Personalist, taught at Boston University.  He is often cited in papers about complex moral matters, particularly about sex and love, but the moral status of the person in distributed moral obligations is a concern for principled persons of all kinds, including those of us with profound respect for personhood in every species.

Peter Anthony Bertocci

May 13, 1910-October 13, 1989

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, where he taught for thirty-one years. B.A., Boston (1931); M.A., Harvard (1932); Ph.D., Boston (1935).  Dissertation: The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (published in 1938 by Boston University Press; advisor: Frederick Robert Tennant - the process metaphysician).

Other books include 
The Human Venture in Sex, Love, and Marriage (1949); 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1951);
Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace (1957); 
Religion as Creative Insecurity (1958);
Sex, Love, and the Person (1967); 
The Person God Is (1970); and 
The Goodness of God (1981)

On This Site:a

• The Person, Obligation, and Value [1959]
  
• Susan K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind[1970]
  

Materialism: Failing before Life’s Challenges

In 1951, Bertocci wrote:

“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one.  Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter.  This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another.  But let us take a closer look.  Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained?  Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical.  But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical.  The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another.  Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain.  Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are.  However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence.   We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery.  What mystery?  The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”

“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value.  The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”

Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).

Fifty years later, the atheist Antony Flew wrote:

“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past.  But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life.  For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction.  [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]

“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third.  The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’  The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”

Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.

Posted October 13, 2007

On my refrigerator is a refrigerator magnet from folk song artist Jay Mankita, for his melodic and memorable album, 'Dogs are watching us." He talks about their trust in us (unlike cats, some might add; others have inspired the trust and love of one or more cats, but that's a different day's posting).
Some of us may find this topic mildly to moderately offensive (some may find it greatly or even profoundly bothering or offensive). It's an obvious takeoff from the song 'God is watching us' which gave many folks pause in the face of an unsettled society in multifactorial upheaval.

Others might think, well, if God is not vegan or even vegetarian (think of all the omnivorous animals in the creation and the deadly 'food chain' observation, even if some of us are exempt, as perhaps the stewards - we humans - who can honor God in the respect of loving all creation (a la NT scholar and professor Richard Alan Young: Is God a Vegetarian?), then at least (omnivorous) dogs CAN be (and should be, for ethical reasons.

Others object, but though cats need taurine (which CAN now be synthesized in a lab (it's good to be gifted with the neurological complexity that enables rational behaviors AND rational analysis, which can lead to the social construction of scientific method and scientific results which reshape society according to socially desirable HUMANE values), (omnivorous) dogs clearly CAN be not merely vegetarian, but also vegan.

The watershed book in the Vegetarian Dogs (and possibly! cats) movement was Dogs and Cats Go Vegetarian by the co-authors whose surname rhymes with EDEN: Barbara Lynn Peden (who did most of the journal research, I'm told; she is now a folksinger, I'm told) and her former husband, James Peden, who in the divorce got full rights to their shared book production AND VegDog & VegCat and empire (he had a paying job on the side and could sustain the D&GV 'empire' (enterprise) ("Harbingers of a New Age"), and she, claiming no extra-corporate skills of her own (though she had done most of the journal research and networking), left with little in the way terminated employees often do, with no IP rights to the work they have done along the way. Jim has since written new literature and a new chapter in the re-released book. In this light, one ought to read the book about Little Tyke, the vegetarian (not vegan) lioness, sold by the American Vegan Society (she died from being overstressed and overexposed on television as a celebrity - read 'oddity' or 'curiosity')

Blaming PETA in the recent media blitzes about vegan - read that again - not vegetarian but VEGAN dogs AND CATS - are those who (IMHO rightly) are concerned that some animals are, when not technically assisted with periodic lab-derived supplementary doses, suffer - read that again - SUFFER. However, the question persists, particularly in a Christian (read Genesis: God gave the animals the world; there was no DEATH (thus no killing for food) in Eden (rhymes with Peden).

More broadly, in monotheistic, Abrahamic 'traditions' of receiving the common literature of Genesis, the problem remains. Mohammed reported taught that 'it is better to drink milk than to eat meat', and while not PROSCRIBING the eating of meat (forbidding or teaching that it is wrong), there is remarkable tolerance in some branches of Christendom and Jewish practice, and even calendared encouragements of it (for its spiritual and 'meditative' or devotional benefits - as in Lent or in PRAYER AND fasting, etc.). Some monastics are largely or always vegetarian in some branches of Christendom. Dissident NON-MONASTIC groups have been suppressed, but often for doctrinary (not doctrinaire, but doctrinary - related to teaching or 'doctrine') or 'non-subscribing' (to doctrine) reasons.

What concerns me, though, is the philosophical problem of thinking inductively in the present world (as we all must) and committing oneself to a loving, rational (and both all-wise and all-knowing AND all-powerful) Deity, known among the uninitiated as God, though sometimes and by some through more personal names, quite reverently thought.

God has an interest in our intentionality - our behaviors - deliberate and unintentional

Some ways of being ourselves behaviorally and mentally are better (or at least less objectionable) than other behaviors. Some secular folks agree to this much; not all do.

In Genesis we are given stewardship in the sense of caring for all life; from this our (a) ecological and (b) humane AND (c) sociological stewardship obligations are derived.

In terms of our spiritually-derived public policy contributions, how can we endorse (let alone mandate) that we OR others care for animals - and humans, too - and the ecosystem in ways that trade off the well-being of some for that of others, even if mathematically one is numerically or quantitatively better.

Further, we’re helped along in this reflection by the prophecy of Isaiah, where the predatory rests with the herbivore, and there is no more exploitation of one (type) of the other (type), nor of one (type) by the other (type).

So, is keeping carnivorous animals, even pre-existing animals BEFORE any possible PHASING OUT of carnivorous animals by massive spay-neuter programs, ethically tolerable, particularly for those who derive at least part of their moral reasoning and rationale from Biblical sources and indirectly from others who also derive their thinking from those Biblical sources/texts?
VegetarianInBoston
Searching for vegan-friendly pet food is laudable in general, but specifically in light of this contextual reflection, that somehow, in the process BEFORE God becomes 'All in All', we ought to live in light of the eschaton, the hope of which (perhaps the Indwelling spirit, would be a foretaste or earnest (like earnest money) of one's spiritual inheritance, a life in a world of no more violence, for which righteousness we are to hunger and thirst (and surely our food would be characterized by having no violence).