Read This Book!

Gilbert Meilaender’s Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person (2009) is worth the read. I don’t recommend that everyone buy it but those who ponder the puzzle of how we can maintain the idea of the equality of persons while recognizing that the lives of some far excel those of others should read it. Meilaender teases apart the concepts of personal dignity—what we share by virtue of personhood—and human dignity—the ways in which human capacities are unequally distributed or exercised.

I won’t analyze Neither Beast Nor God like I did Nick Wolterstorff’s Justice but the former’s neo-Aristotelian approach and the latter’s analytic perspective combine and contrast in interesting ways.

A couple of paragraphs summarizing what it means to be living organism. "Rocks is rocks;" they don’t change over time. (Sure, rocks eventually become stones and then pebbles and finally dust but the original “rock matter” remains the same.) Living organisms continually change. Even immobile plants draw nutrients from the soil and air and a substantial portion (all?) of the atoms of my mother’s African violet have “turned over,” so to speak, from the day she cut a leaf from another plant many, many years ago until today. As soon as a living organism stops changing, it’s dead. Physical life entails constant growth and repair: “The very being of the organism consists in sustaining itself by carrying on this work of exchange with its environment.” (10) By the end of a goodly life nothing will be left from an organism’s beginning. Thus, an organism is free in the sense that it’s not the same as its material substance; if it were, the organism would either have no continuity over time or it would be dead.

So what? An organism is free from the world and simultaneously dependent upon it, “needful freedom,” as Meilaender puts it. An organism—unlike a rock—has purpose; “to live is to engage purposefully in the exchanges of matter that metabolism involves.” (13) That’s what it means to be alive. Teleology, not matter (DNA), is fundamental. The life of an organism is not identical with matter; life, especially reflective human life, is free to determine its own way—we aren’t rocks. But the life of an organism depends on matter; if the constant exchange of matter ceases, so does life—we aren’t God.

As Meilaender acutely observes, modern and postmodern folk jump from one pole to the other. Some want to be post-humans, in no way dependent on matter (minds separated from brains by an everlasting upload). Others (often the same folks after a really bad day or with particularly obstreperous children), deny freedom and seek surcease in the products of pharmacology (as if they’re nothing but clumps of malleable matter).

Until we acknowledge who we are—material, bodily creatures created in the image of God—we can’t be happy. Until we acknowledge who we are, we’ll continue to run away the wonder of the life we have.