Anthropocentric? (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #21)
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This week, I’m looking at a single section from David H. Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology—which I am indeed still steadily working through, although the last few months have seen me spend a bit less time on it expected, for a variety of reasons including both COVID-19 and composing. Yesterday evening, though, I read a very interesting set of paragraphs, and I’ve been mulling on it since. (Fair warning, this is dense, but I think it’s worth your time!)
This discussion invites an important objection that must be addressed immediately. The objection goes like this: Construing creation, and with it human creatures, as the quotidian, and then construing the quotidian, and with it human creatures, in terms of human practices, privileges a particular model of the human person and a particular conceptual scheme with which to describe it. Focus on practices privileges an intentional agent model of human personhood, and its attendant conceptual schemes. There are, of course, a variety of philosophical action theories. Nonetheless, an intentional-agent model of human personhood relies on a family of concepts presided over by concepts of practice, mental intention, and bodily action. Privileging such concepts, the objection goes, will inevitably lead to a radically anthropocentric view of creation, and therewith of human creatures. To do so puts into play a pattern of thinking that systematically elevates human creatures over the rest of the creation, for only human creatures are capable in the full sense of intentions and intentional actions and enacting practices, and so only they are really creatures. So far as their reality and value are concerned, all other creatures are reduced to the status of extensions or appendages of human creatures.
Before I rebut this objection, some concessions are in order. Later on I suggest that some versions of an intentional-agent description of human personhood, and the conceptual scheme it requires, do promise to provide a way to avoid the theologically objectionable tendency to dichotomize mental intention and bodily action, subjectivity and objectivity, interiority and exteriority, individual and society, private and public in descriptions of what human personhood is. It is also certainly the case that a theological construal of the quotidian guided by biblical Wisdom does not purport to give an objective picture of the creaturely realm—that is, a picture without perspective, point of view, or orienting interest. Nor does it purport to give a view of creatures from God's point of view. It is in this fashion human-centered in its way of knowing the quotidian. It is, we might say, epistemically anthropocentric. Indeed, we might wonder how it could be otherwise when it is human persons who are trying to understand the context into which they have been born as God’s creation.
However, this perspective is not necessarilyontologically anthropocentric. It does not assume or suggest that other creatures are real and have value only to the extent that they can serve as instruments that extent the scope and power of human persons’ practices, rather than being real and valuable in their own right. Such a view would be ontologically anthropocenetric. There is nothing in the invitation to view the quotidian in terms of human creatures’ practices that implies the impossibility of our attending to fellow creatures with a compassionate and just gaze. Nor does it assume that other creatures’ reality and value are constituted by their having been created to actualize purposes or ends relative to human well-being. They are not created by God simply for us.
Indeed, canonical biblical Wisdom invites us to attend to the creatures that, along with us, make up the quotidian, as genuinely other than we in being and value. It invites us to do this, to be sure, from the perspective of those human practices whose guiding interest is the well-being of the quotidian, including human creatures. It is always conceptually possible for that interest to distort reflection from this perspective in an ideologically biased way, perhaps in the direction of an ontologically anthropocentric view of human creaturehood. However, the perspective provided by human practices does not necessarily entail this. Nor is there any systematic move that can be made in theology that will conceptually guarantee that such distortion will not happen. What we can do is be vigilantly self-critical in testing whether we have fallen prey to this danger.
First, a clarification I think will help make sense of much of the rest of my discussion: “the quotidian” in Kelsey’s usage is roughly the everyday world we inhabit, as we find it and as we change it through our practices. It’s a given in that we find ourselves in this world, and as Christians we affirm that it is created with purpose and order and structure—but it is also a thing in which we participate, which we form. That participation and formation means that the quotidian is, therefore, the everyday world in all its fullness: not merely the “natural” world in which we participate, but also the culture we create, and the transformations we cause in all of the above.
This little excursus drives at something that I’ve never framed in exactly this way before: the idea that certain theological ways of viewing the world are nastily anthropocentric. To be sure, I’ve long considered that there are worldviews in which the world around us—Kelsey’s quotidian—is treated as subservient to humanity. That can show up in all sorts of ways: from a rapacious disregard for the rest of the world in pursuit of profit, to theological systems which end up coming out in terms of denying the importance of caring for the world around us. Certain variants of dispensationalism, for example, lean so hard into both the imminence of Christ’s return and the idea that the world as we know it will be not redeemed but destroyed that they can see no value in working deeply to treat the other parts of God’s created order with great care. If the only things that matter are human souls—the ontological anthopocentrism Kelsey names—then why bother worrying about pollution, or species dying off, or the long-term sustainability of any of our practices? Why give any consideration to anything beyond what benefits humans, directly or indirectly?
Gratefully, few Christians I’ve ever encountered espouse anything like those (frankly abhorrent) views. But I have run into them here and there online (because if a view exists, and you spend enough time online, you’ll find it). And more, the less-directly-awful versions of this—the versions which implicitly assume that the world basically exists for humans rather than that humans exist as part of the world God created for his own purposes, of which we are a good part and perhaps even an especially important part—are so common as to be unremarkable. This is not great, to put it mildly.
To return to Kelsey’s point: our encounter with the world is necessarily epistemically anthropocentric. We are only able to encounter the world as human beings, situated amongst other human beings. We do not and cannot perceive the world as a bird or a fish or a dog does. That does not remove from us the obligation to consider the goods those other created beings represent: goods distinct from our own, different in kind, and sharply distinguished from humans theologically… but not thereby devalued.
We tend to counter mistakes not by aiming for what is right but by pushing against what is wrong. Accordingly, we tend here to move from recognizing varieties of misanthropism around us by hyper-valuing humans and devaluing non-human beings. Kelsey reminds us—helpfully—that valuing humans need not entail devaluing the rest of God’s good creation. To this point I would add that even valuing humans as made in the image of God (uniquely among the rest of creation, so far as has been revealed to us), and even more as the only form into which God has deigned to become incarnate, still does not require us to devalue any other created thing. Rather, we should stand in wonder at them as well.
There are swallows outside my window right now, swooping and playing on the wind and occasionally darting and diving to snatch bugs out of the air. What is that capering existence like? What do I owe them as creatures? What happens if our imaginary for the goodness of the world expands to include not only them, but the moths they eat as well, and the plants the moths feast on, and all good things?