The Selfhood of the Human Person [Paperback]

John F. Crosby (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0813208653 | ISBN-13: 978-0813208657 | Publication Date: November 1996

We often hear it said that "each person is unique and unrepeatable" or that "each person is his own end and not a mere instrumental means." But what exactly do these familiar sayings mean? What are they based on? How do we know they are true? In this book, John F. Crosby answers these questions by unfolding the mystery of personal individuality or uniqueness, or as he calls it personal "selfhood." He stands in the great tradition of Western philosophy and draws on Aquinas wherever possible, but he is also deeply indebted to more recent personalist philosophy, especially to the Christian personalism of Kierkegaard and Newman and to the phenomonology of Scheler and von Hildebrand. As a result, Crosby, in a manner deeply akin to the philosophical work of Karol Wojtyla, enriches the old with the new as he explores the structure of personal selfhood, offering many original contributions of his own. Crosby sheds new light on the "incommunicability" and unrepeatability of each human person. He explores the subjectivity, or interiority, of persons as well as the much-discussed theme of their "transcendence," giving particular attention to the transcendence achieved by persons in their moral existence. Finally he shows how we are led through the person to God, and he concludes with an original and properly philosophical approach to the "image" of God in each person. Throughout his study, Crosby is careful not to take selfhood in an individualistic way. He shows how the "selfhood and solitude" of each person opens each to others, and how, far from interfering with interpersonal relations, it in fact renders them possible. "Crosby makes an invaluable contribution to the future of Catholic. This book will become must reading for anyone interested in the relation of John Paul's personalism to the perennial philosophy and neo-Thomism. For those interested in mediating personalism and Thomism, Crosby is their best guide."--Deal W. Hudson, Editor, Crisis magazine

John F. Crosby is professor and chair of philosophy at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. He has taught at the University of Dallas, the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome, and at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. Professor Crosby earned his doctorate in philosophy from the Universitaet Salzburg, Austria, studying with Josef Seifert and having Dietrich von Hildebrand as his master.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This work is a serious philosophical study full of many rich insights that advance significantly our understanding of the human person. -- Norris Clarke, S.J., Fordham University --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Publisher

Crosby unfolds the mystery of personal uniqueness, shedding new light on the incommunicability and unrepeatability of each human person. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 313 pages
• Publisher: Catholic University of America Press (November 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813208653
• ISBN-13: 978-0813208657
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A phenomenological analysis of personal selfhood, February 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Selfhood of the Human Person (Paperback)

While drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, Crosby's textured analysis of selfhood hews closely to lived experience. It is this experiential orientation that makes Crosby's work accessible to a non-philosophical audience. Crosby also provides an antidote to certain strains of personalist thinking that reduce the person to a "system of relationships." While giving transcendence and relatedness their due (especially in light of such moral phenomena as value response and obligation), Crosby takes pains to anchor relationality in a prior understanding of the person as a unique individual, characterized by self-possession and incommunicability.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A milestone in phenomenological anthropology, March 21, 2004

By 

Philip Blosser (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Selfhood of the Human Person (Hardcover)

This book by a Catholic phenomenologist marks a milestone in philosophical anthropology. It is probably the most significant original contribution to the field in recent years, from the perspective of phenomenological personalism, to appear in the English language. No less important, it is clearly and accessibly written. Any reader who has languished through the iniquitous translation of Karol Wojtyla's THE ACTING PERSON, or who finds phenomenological approaches frequently impenetrable and mystifying, will be pleasantly surprised by the remarkable clarity and accessibility of Crosby's crisply-written and well-organized presentation. Crosby draws from phenomenology (Scheler, Wojtyla, Edith Stein, and his own mentor, von Hildebrand), personalist sources (Kierkegaard, Newman, Wojtyla again, and Josef Seifert), neo-Thomism (Maritain) and the philosophia perennis, combining many of the same sorts of perspectives one finds in Wojtyla. Readers of Crosby's painstaking phenomenological analysis of human "selfhood" may find portions of his discussion sufficiently penetrating and compelling to induce an eerie sense of having been conducted into the precincts of that profound, mysterious interiority called the "self" as if for the first time.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very fine essay in what it means to be a person, April 16, 2008

By 

Aquinas "summa" (celestial heights, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Selfhood of the Human Person (Paperback)

This is a brilliant essay on the human person following the personalist/phenomonological line of thought (a philosophical approach taken by our beloved pope John Paul II).

To do this book justive, a single reading does not suffice; it needs several readings, not because it is hard to follow - not at all! Crosby is very readable - I found it very comprehensible and I am not trained in philosophy.

No, it is simply because there is so much in this book; such as the role of immanence and transcendence in the human person - what does it mean to say that persons possess a kind of incommunicablity? When does a person become a person? Am I not a person if I am not conscious? (no!) Do I lose my personhood, if, for example, I go into a coma? (no!) Is an embryo a human person? (yes!) What is it about persons that make them unique or incommunicable? How does incommunicability tie in with man's social dimension? So, what is it that makes me a person? Is it "esse" or being, a concept that has been lost sight of since Descartes. Yes, but not in the narrow scholastic sense, a person is not simply defined by "esse" - I am getting out of my depth here! But, it seems to me it is precisely in the area of subjectivity that personalism has advanced our understanding of personhood.

Let me make some quotes to give the reader an insight into how good a book this is:

"is there in each person essential content that is beyond the distinction between universal form and concrete substance, so that the essential content is not just participated in but rather completely possessed by the person, possessing it in such a way so as to eliminate the possibilty of another person participating in the same essential content. We ascribe this essential incommunicability to God when we say that He does not participate in His essence, but rather He is His essence: our question is whether the human person resembles God in this respect by being in some analgous way his own essence (page 64).

"Each person has an essential something that would be forever lost to the world, leaving a kind of irreparable metaphysical hole, in it, if the person embodying it were to go out of existence altogether". (page 65)

And against those who use the Beethoven argument against abortion, he says:

"Whoever does not undersand that the value of the person completely overshadows these excellences and in a sense relativises them does not really understand this value. Whoever does not understand how much worth persons have by being persons and what a relatively small value difference arises from them having some talent and another lacking it, does not really understand the dignity of persons" (page 68)

"The loss of Beethoven would been a terrible loss because the world would have been deprived of an incommunicable person; only quite secondarily would it have been a loss because the world would have been deprived of a musical genius". (page 70)

And on the subjectivity of the human person, he says; "the stronger my self-presence, the more I enter into the object outside of me; my self presence does not compete with my transcence towards the object but rather renders this transcendence possible and perfects it". (page 84)

"But my idea is that it is not just the misery but the greatness of the human person that makes us flee from ourselves, the source of our being image Dei" (page 105)

Crosby is really excellent on the similarities and disimilarities between the human person and God, whilst recognising the abyss that separates God and Man.

"Human person are constantly actualising themsleves out of a state of potency and are constantly in danger of losing to potency such actuality as they have" (page 258)

"There is a dividedness at the very centre of the life of the spirit, n the depths of the person. Kierkegaard spoke of it when in his analysis of despair he showed how each person has to choose between willing to be the self which he is, and refusing to be the self which he is (which is despair) (page 270).

I should add that there is also a very valuable discussion on altruism, which Crosby, like von Hildebrand, sees as potentially damaging to the subject; the subject must never lose sight of his own joy, becoming a kind of sacrificial lamb at the expense of his own subjective happiness - this is a a very difficult area - namely how to reconcile one's own joy with the christian requirement to serve: "the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for man"

This book is immensely impressive and I have given a very poor account of it; in my view, Crosby makes considerable advances on his master, von Hilderbrand, making the language of personalism clear, beautiful and exciting.

Many thanks!