Chapter 2.
2. The human person (1)
Having established the basis of a theory of knowledge through consideration of the essential, known object (being), Rosmini's next step is to consider the nature of the human subject. This, in turn, requires an analysis of the constitutive animal and intellective elements of the human being as a means towards presenting an adequate anthropology and psychology of human nature.
At this point, reading Rosmini becomes both difficult and extremely rewarding for the modern mind. The difficulties arise from our habit, evident especially in scientific studies, of giving almost total attention to quantifiable, sense phenomena. In psychology, for example, we find ourselves dealing with psychological phenomena without attempting to examine the problem of the existence and nature of 'psyche'; we think about the characteristics of 'personality' without reference to any underlying person. These mental habits are so ingrained that we tend to categorise all thinking in this way. The result, when we find ourselves face to face with reasoning like Rosmini's, which will not conform to our own intellectual activity, is a genuine sense of disorientation. We seem to move in an unreal world, and we are left with profound misgivings.
At the same time, the phenomenological world is essentially incapable of offering any lasting, satisfactory solution to the fundamental problems arising from our perceived status as human beings. 'A bundle of sensations', as human beings have often been described, is too flippant a way of dismissing the problems involved in self-examination and analysis. Rosmini, while requiring us to look at and observe adequately the whole of nature, draws us beyond the phenomena to that which sustains them, and in particular to the human person, the individual, the unquantifiable mystery which each one of us senses himself to be. Rosmini is determined to present both the phenomena and their underlying explanation.
Two elements are to hand as undeniable factors of our experience; being as intuited and known, the basis of all knowledge, and feeling, the foundation of human subjectivity. Rosmini's theory of knowledge deals principally with intuited being, and his anthropology and psychology with the nature of animal and intellective feeling.
Animal feeling, which we so often take as solely phenomenological, has its place for Rosmini amongst the elements which provide the final explanation of human phenomena. On the basis of observation which, he insists, has to take account both of order in feeling and of our conscious individuality, we arrive at a first feeling, the principle and subject of all other feelings, that is, at a feeling without which other feelings cannot exist. This feeling, as first act, is life; it is a substantial, fundamental feeling; it is what we call properly 'soul' (in our present case 'the animal aspect of the soul'). The soul provides a basis for all other feelings that occur within us, and posits the individuality which establishes each of us with our own incommunicability.
| The soul is an originating, stable feeling, the unique principle and unique subject of all other feelings and human activities (2). |
But the feeling which properly speaking constitutes the substance of the soul (3) is made up of two distinct, but inseparable elements. On the one hand, we find a simple, immaterial, sentient principle; on the other the extended, felt term:
| That which is felt and that which feels make up a single feeling which, as the first and fundamental feeling, is a unique entity (4). |
However, because the union between sentient principle and felt term is that proper to form and matter, and not that of two individual substances, the feeling principle as form (and consequently as that which provides the intelligibility and nomenclature of feeling) is given the name 'soul'.
The soul is tied to its own body by the bond of uniform, indeterminate, shapeless feeling. This is the subjective feeling with which the animal feels itself and which a human being at a given level of consciousness calls 'myself'. Within this general feeling, that which feels experiences all the modifications taking place in the energy called its own body. Such modifications can be provoked either by the feeling principle itself or by external agents. Sensations springing from the subject-agent produce subjective modifications in the fundamental feeling; sensations coming from the action of bodies other than one's own, or from one's own as from a foreign body, produce what Rosmini calls 'extrasubjective' phenomena.
This fundamental corporeal feeling and its modifications throw light on the animal element of the soul. The rational element is discovered as we meditate on 'myself'. Careful attention to 'myself' reveals the presence in the human being of purely spiritual feelings, that is, of feelings which terminate neither in extension nor in matter of any kind whatsoever.
Chief amongst these feelings is that encompassed by the very word 'myself' which describes our essential self, and indicates something unique, separate and altogether distinct from everything else. The incorporeal, immaterial feeling to which we refer, whose reality cannot be denied despite its total lack of extension and its imperviousness to space of any kind, is spiritual of its nature. Its origin is found in the union existing between the knowing subject and the idea of being.
'Myself', therefore, is a single subject with two terms, the idea of being and the body I call my own. 'Myself' is not two subjects but one, which undertakes simultaneously animal and rational activities. I who understand, feel, and I who feel, understand.
This is possible, according to Rosmini, because the intelligent and animal aspects of soul both have an outreach to being. The intelligent part of 'myself' terminates in being as understood; the animal part of 'myself' terminates in being as felt. The single subject uniting in itself the fundamental, corporeal principle and the vision of being becomes a rational principle which sees the fundamental feeling in the light of the being it intuits. When this takes place a new human nature is realised.
| This primitive and fundamental perception of all that is felt (principle and term) is the marriage-bed, as it were, where that which is real (the animal-spiritual feeling) and the essence intuited in the idea of being form a single thing; and this single reality is a new human being (5). |
The human being, therefore, is composed of animality, of reason (intelligence and will), and of a principle common to animality and reason, the human subject. This subject is the supreme principle, the root and the fount of real existence and activity in the human being. As supreme, it is also the human person.
At this point, Rosmini is able to distinguish between the action of the individual as person, and as human being. Only one principle is supreme in the human being; in so far as action is directed by this principle, the human being acts as a person. But there are within the human being multiple sources of activity (feelings, desires, instincts), each rooted in its own proper principle. If any of these principles acts independently of the supreme principle, consequent acts of such a principle are natural, but not personal. And it is a fact that there are many branches of human activity which reach very high levels of perfection without involving personal activity. The development of modern science, for example, does not necessarily entail greater moral perfection in human beings; knowledge is not always wisdom; 'progress' is not synonymous with 'civilisation' when the human person, the only principle capable of involving in progress the total human being, has been set aside. When the supreme principle acts in its fullness, it has at its command the use of those first acts which make up the primary elements of the human being.
The primary activities of the soul according to Rosmini, who goes on to analyse human activity in great detail, are constituted by the powers of intellect and will, sense and instinct, and reason. Sense is passive in so far as it is limited to receiving some modification from an agent (body); intellect is receptive in so far as it receives the idea of being without confusion between itself and this idea. Instinct and will are the reactive powers which spring from the passivity and receptivity of sense and intellect. Instinct, which is active, can change both itself and the term on which it operates; the will, which is also active, cannot change its term, the ideas (towards which it is receptive), but can change its choice of activity relative to those ideas by acknowledging or refusing to acknowledge them for what they are.
Rosmini's detailed analysis of the activity of these powers is devoted to clarifying their different modes of being. His pages on the manner in which sense and instinct operate are highly original. In particular, he shows at length that animal instinct is far more versatile than we usually imagine, and dependent not upon any use of intelligence, but to a great extent on laws of harmony found within purely animal reality and with nature at large. Nevertheless, in the human being the unity of intelligence and sense within an individual is beneficial and necessary to human and personal well-being. Although ideal being is given in toto to the human intelligence, and is thus simple and indivisible, it does not furnish the mind with anything real (I cannot produce anything, for example, simply by thinking about it). On the other hand, being as seen by the mind is effectively participated by the human subject through the subject's real power of feeling, but in a limited, piecemeal way only.
Notes
(1) Cf. especially Antropologia in servigio delle scienze morali [1838] CrE, Stresa 1981, translated as Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science, Durham 1992; Psicologia [1846-48], CrE, Stresa 1988.
(2). Psicologia, CrE, t. 1, no. 129.
(3). Cf. Ibid. no. 81.
(4). Ibid, no. 250.
(5). Ibid, no. 261.