Who/Persons
Persons
Jacob spoke first. "I want to know if my hair is just like yours," he told Mr. Obama.... Mr. Obama replied, "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?" He lowered his head, level with Jacob, who hesitated. "Touch it, dude!" Mr. Obama said.... "So, what do you think?" Mr. Obama asked. "Yes, it does feel the same," Jacob said.[1]Even Presidents are persons, like all of us. Let's not forget it. We construct and use A Place to Study as a work of persons, for persons, and by persons. Let's think and act with persons in mind. That's not always so easy, for we live in a world populated by many roles — student, teacher, employee, manager, cashier, police officer, doctor or lawyer, pastor, sergeant, sailor, reporter, and many more, Presidents, too. Much of our education, formal and informal, teaches us to embody the various roles that circumstances thrust upon us. But our inner-I thinks and feels as the person that lives — not our behaviors, but our lives.
Persons live, or have lived, or will live; we have inner lives, we feel appetites and drives, we have emotions, we perceive, act, and direct ourselves as best we can, coping imperfectly with real constraints. Persons think and reason, we experience our world, we each suffer, enjoy, fear, and hope. We can understand ourselves and other persons because they and us, because we, all of us, are living or have lived, concrete personal lives.
A person lives an historical, existential actuality, as an “I” that inextricably includes both her “I” and her “circumstances.” I cannot abstract my life from the circumstances within which my life takes place, within which I try to conduct it as best I can. Rarely can I do just what I please; freedom arises as we act uncertain about our abilities and the conditions we will meet through the use of them.
Let's speak infrequently about the individual, which best denotes an abstract construction that exists only in thought as a means to group various descriptors together. In contrast to the person, the abstract “individual” is; it is a conceptual doll, bearing properties, decked out in various outfits like Barbie or Ken, each named with its qualities classified and counted by careful observers, who predict how the stick figures will behave in a world of statistical abstraction, rigidly motivated by a compound causality, the parts of which aggregate to 100%, provided of course that Barbie doesn’t suffer from the statistical pulchritude of over-determination.*
Let's work to clarify the problems of life, and we can begin by minimizing reliance on the verb to be, restricting it as much as possible to use as an auxiliary verb. Frequent use of the verb to be, trying to delimit what something is, rather than saying what something does, often renders what actually happens vague, pinning life to the specimen board. For instance, saying “the state should be the provider of healthcare for its citizens” makes little sense, for doctors and hospitals provide health care, not the state. But to phrase the issue in question with the correct verb, “the state should pay for the health care of its citizens,” states the speaker’s position clearly and invites intelligible responses. Whenever possible, instead of saying what a person or agent is, we should say what the person or agent does.†
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