The Difference of Difference
Do Categories Matter in Our Care of Persons?
The remainder of 2022, writing-wise, is devoted to finishing a long-languishing project that I began in 2018: describing the history of 20th century ecclesiology, using the four marks (one, holy, catholic, and apostolic) to tell that story. Like both books this Spring, this will also be out with Baker Academic.
But the last few months digging into how Dorothy Day helps us think about the value of institutions has made me want to pull my thinking about Day together into a large project provisionally entitled How to Be Human: The Christian Life with Dorothy Day. Her thought is simultaneously rich and elusive, evocative in places where I wish it was more explicit, mostly because she was perennially being a saint in the city.
One of the core commitments of her thought was philosophical personalism, which has multiple variations. Summed up in a 2018 article in the Catholic Worker newspaper which Day founded, personalism entails something like the following:
a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals. In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions, rather than looking to the state or other institutions to provide impersonal "charity." We pray for a Church renewed by this philosophy and for a time when all those who feel excluded from participation are welcomed with love, drawn by the gentle personalism Peter Maurin taught.1
Where we’ve seen this cashing out is that the attention which is due each person cannot be administered by large scale institutions, which attend to overall goals and overriding values, and to persons insofar as their lives overlap with the goals and values of an institution. There’s a lot to appreciate about this, particularly against the backdrop of technocratic assumptions which govern a lot of our world: it’s attentive, concerned with contours of virtue of the person before you, and above all, refuses to reduce persons to their participation in certain classes.
This sounds great, right? Two issues appear here that are worth attending to, though.
Personalism, in disavowing bureaucratic categories of care, runs into a basic problem of recognition: we see people at first only by the categories with which we have in play already. I can’t see someone from scratch, building a sense of a person from nothing, but on the basis of what I already know or think I know. This is where personalism pushes us past class-based thinking and prejudices, to attend to persons in front of us, but as a theory of knowledge, it depends on us having some sense of categories to work with. Personalism works if you understand it as a morally purgative philosophy—that there is more than meets the eye and I should seek that something out—but it’s always constrained and predicated on the thing it’s trying to overcome: class-based thinking.
This one isn’t fatal, I don’t think: the best kinds of philosophy don’t presume that we are self-made, or that we could be. To say that personalist philosophy wants to move us beyond class-based thinking is just to say that there are more interesting and more important things to attend to than categories of belonging alone.
Personalism, in focusing so intently on the particular person, runs into an interesting inverse problem of class-based thinking: an inordinate emphasis on difference. If class-based thinking works by emphasizing what distinguishes one group of persons from others, then personalism works in the same logic, only at the individual level. Forms of advocacy which operate by leveraging the concerns of one class work at the cost of emphasizing difference at the expense of commonality—we are groups of persons who may seem to be similar but ultimately have a yawning divide between us which cannot ultimately be bridged. But personalism—in attending so closely to the individual needs—runs the same risk, by making each person such a unique collection that there can be no wisdom applied across persons.
So, personalism, in adopting an inverse position from the Marxism it wants to avoid, winds up positing the same problem, just at the individual level instead of the class level. Is there a way out of this?
The way out may be something like Day herself employs: class critique gives us eyes to see general dimensions and structural tendencies, but not an exclusive window into what harms or damages a person. To ignore it is to miss the ways in which persons are both bearers of larger powers that they are not conciously making use of, but to reduce a person to do this is to say that not even the rich man might be saved. The rich man has a particular way toward his salvation that is not enjoined upon those without great wealth, but to attend ultimately only to the dynamics of the rich man as sui generis is to isolate him utterly, to demand that his psychology and ontology is so unique that it can have no analogue, and thus, no wisdom that might be applied to his situation.
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Reading: For a seminar quite a while from now, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones. Kind of ho-hum thus far. Michael Schur’s How to Be Perfect is pretty fun—Schur wrote The Good Place, which mostly gets philosophy right, even if you think that most forms of moral philosophy are bankrupt.
Paid Version Coming! Beginning May 1, I’ll launch a 3$/month paid version, which will be a kind of “reader-response” version: you ask the questions, I give you some framework and ways to engage the question, complete with some literature to turn to. This will also be a “commonplace book” of sorts, with miscelany of reading and early drafts of what I’m working on.
https://www.catholicworker.org/cw-aims-and-means.html