Going Back to Basics: Philosophical Anthropology and the Metaphysics of Agency (Report‪)‬

This paper brings together two names not commonly associated: Austin Farrer and Ludwig Feuerbach. For these two very different thinkers person-concepts provided the key to a metaphysical vision. That vision, I suggest, represents a critical return to religious praxis. Philosophically, the closed categories of scholastic ontology are exchanged for a concrete theory of persons. That theory concerns the dialectical development of self-hood. It predicates consciousness on social premises. Thus, self-hood develops as a response to life in community. Most importantly, the activities, ideas, and ideals which express that self-hood are not only transacted with others, they are learned from them. In teaching us how to act, how to speak, how to think, others supply the tools with which we construct our identities. For Farrer and Feuerbach the reflection of religious consciousness here was unmistakable. Analogies drawn from our prospective involvement with others provide the terms with which to make sense of our talk about God. These analogies overcome the 'abstract, merely conceptual being' of that 'old onto-theology.' They offer instead 'a God about whom we have something to do.' This concerns the logically basic role of person-concepts in metaphysical exploration. Our first and most primal notion of 'real being' is as a corollary of consciousness, socially constituted, physically enacted. Moreover, these psycho-dynamic structures also remind us what 'God-talk' is really about. The same process of conscious becoming is expressed in the practice of faith: the self co-constructing itself in relation to others.