83. THE MEANING OF PERSONS — B
We begin with this second gleaning from Paul Tournier’s The Meaning of Persons with his citing a Professor Gusdorf who wrote that introspection has failed completely as a valid means of discovering the person. Although many have debated this issue, Tournier quotes Paul Claudel who wrote, “Merely by looking at ourselves we falsify ourselves.” And, Tournier adds, “Self-examination is an exhausting undertaking. The mind becomes so engrossed in it that it loses its normal capacity for relationship with the world and with God. Locked in a narrow round of endless and sterile self-analysis, the person becomes shrunk and deformed, while false problems multiply ad infinitum.” So spoke the psychiatrist.
Tournier draws us more deeply into this approach when he states: “I do not say that this delving into ourselves is entirely valueless; it opens up a rich field for discovery; the trouble is that it is too rich. Every time we are sincere about it, we see that some attitude, which we thought we had taken up spontaneously, is in fact the result of mechanisms, which, because they are more deep-seated, we take to be more authentically personal. … If our sincerity is exacting, we soon see that we have doffed one garment only to find another beneath it.”
“It would seem that nudists — at any rate some of them — sincerely pursue the paradisiac and utopian dream of a complete divesting of the formal personage in the hope of creating a more genuine human community. To reveal oneself in all simplicity, just as one is, without even hiding what elementary modesty prompts one to conceal, is meant to be the symbol of renunciation of all hypocrisy.”
Short of such an experience, there are ways of bringing our personages into harmony with the person. “It is a case of being in accord with oneself. Pindar put it magnificently: ‘Become what you are.’ We must turn about, and proceed in an entirely new direction. Instead of turning our backs on the outside world and concentrating on our inner life, where the true nature of the person always eludes us, we must look outwards, towards the world, towards our neighbor, towards God. … We shall always wear a garment; we cannot cast it off without tearing away something of ourselves with it. What we can do is to aim at harmony, so that the garment does not belie the wearer.”
Tournier does acknowledge, however, that there will always be a tension between the person that we are and the personages that we express in our daily lives. We are, he says, a type of machine that works automatically to support our survival. It is the mainstay of our existence. But if that is all that there is about us, we are not persons. Love, he adds, is not part of our mechanics. When love displaces hostility, pervasive aggressiveness, dominating self-interest and offers forgiveness and empathy, “we are in the presence of a creative act that is really free and undetermined. It is a bursting forth of life, a positive choosing of a new direction. … It is a manifestation of the person thrusting aside the personage.”
Turning to the dimension of the spirit, Tournier states: “For me it is neither the body which controls the mind, nor the mind which controls the body; rather are both at once the expression of an invisible reality of a spiritual order — the person.”
Dialogue, adds Tournier, is yet another means of being persons. Recalling the natural way of the child, we have secrets that we withhold from most others. When we find ourselves in a relationship with another and are willing to share our secrets, we are affirming our status as persons, and in sharing our persons with a privileged confidante, we affirm the personhood of that other. So, dialogue, like love and awareness of spirit, liberates us as persons.
In this act of dialogue in which a relationship involves both choice and risk and lays us open to an exchange of replies, we act with a responsibility that further opens us as persons. We can maintain our personal convictions, at the risk of being judged or betrayed, and experience a communion that is a mark of personhood grounded in honesty and transparency.
“We pretend to want to know ourselves,” says Tournier, “and we are afraid of knowing ourselves…. But there is also an irresistible force within, which compels us to be honest to the bitter end, to throw off the mask of the personage and uncover the person. … To become a person, to discover the world of persons, to acquire the sense of the person, to be more interested in people as persons than in their ideas, their party labels, their personage, means a complete revolution, changing the climate of our lives.”
Q: How do Tournier’s views connect with your life?
