Two perspectives on personhood
Published on 2024-07-01
What does it mean to be a person?
Perspective #0: liberal humanism
There are considerably more reductive senses in which we can understand what it means to be a "person," but we'll start here.
The liberal humanist perspective on personhood is what I'd call the way we "conventionally" understand personness. I'm a person. You're probably a person. If you don't consider yourself a "person" in the liberal humanist sense, then you are almost certainly something other liberal humanist people would consider a person.
The "break" the liberal humanist perspective has with other, more reductive perspectives, and what's motivated me to assign it the label "liberal humanist," is that it purports to seek common cause with all humans. Any less than liberal humanism and you're going to be ranking different humans, or more generally different "types" of humans within the global human community. So, I bring up the liberal humanist perspective on personhood because it's what I suspect most people think it means to be a person, and it's also gives us a strong baseline to build on.
Perspective #1: animism
Animists believe everything has a spirit, from animals to "inanimate" objects to concepts themselves. So, gently coercing this idea into our conversation about personhood, I'd appropriate the word to describe the perspective that all things constitute people in some way. I suspect you'd have a harder time finding people who believe that literally everything is a person, but plenty of people think that animals are people too. Personally, I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that "inanimate" objects have some animacy to them, especially as a part of much larger systems, so this is something I have a much easier time believing.
As an animist myself, I extend animism to the concept of personhood—that is to say, I broadly consider having a spirit criteria for inclusion on "people," and I broadly consider everything to have a spirit. So this is my perspective on personhood.
Perspective #2: radical reclamation of dehumanization
I've only ever heard the phrase "radical reclamation of dehumanization" once, and a search with quotes on Marginalia turns up no results, but I'm going to use it here.
Taking its meaning literally, radical reclamation of dehumanization is the act of embracing yourself as less than fully human. This idea may broadly apply to otherkin—beings who characteristically see themselves as non-human or otherwise at least partially something other than human.
In the few times I've had the opportunity to talk with otherkin about personhood, perspective #1 seems to come into conflict with perspective #2, and that's what motivated this article. There's a conflation between personhood and humanness, and since calling otherkin "human" is rude, calling them people is too.
I don't think we should conflate personhood and humanity, and so that throws a wrench into this interaction. But the point of radical reclamation of dehumanization isn't to treat other creatures as fundamentally less valuable than humans; it's to recognize the fact that "humanity" is both arbitrary and not necessarily something we should be striving for in its own right. So, this semantic wall is an illusion. The animist and reclamationist perspectives are in fact describing the same thing, just with opposite terminology. The animist says that everything is a person, and the reclamationist calls into the question the need for the label itself.
If everything's a person, then nothing is.
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