The Missing Person: Identity and the Loss of Transcendentals

Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
Oh how I wish he'd go away!

My mother taught me that poem, or rather that verse of the poem, when I was six or seven. While she may have known the original, my guess is that she became familiar with it through Glenn Miller’s musical rendition. 

"Antigonish,” as it is named, presented to my immature but inquisitive mind, is a disconcerting and somewhat scary paradox. And, the fact that the epistemic certainty of the poem’s narrator was rhythmically presented in a headless iambic tetrameter made it all the more evocative—the missing beat somehow representing the missing man that both was and was not there. 

This was likely W. Hughes Mearns’ intent—at least for the original collegiate audience. As a professor at Harvard and Columbia, Mearns had been an advocate of “pushing” people to think. Along with academics and clinicians like William James and John Dewey, he favored creatively challenging the minds of children, adolescents, and young adults in order to expand their analytic and aesthetic capacities. I guess that little poem did do that for me. 

Still, the overwhelming feeling I had when I first encountered this poem was fear, but not fear in the sense of being afraid of a monster under the bed or even a specter in the closet; no, this was the fear arising from my own inability to make sense of reality, fear at my lack of capacity to find order, fear in not discerning any coherent identity construct. At that age I did not refer to it as such, but I was experiencing a moment of anomy—of meaninglessness. And this was not anxiety over my own ignorance or some sense of alienation arising out of childish powerlessness; it really was the briefest moment of anomic despair.

This “man upon the stair” seemed, while ironically a non-existing existence, disconcertingly antagonistic. It was as if this object/ non-object was viewing my very being with jealous contempt. I was not merely an impotent child; my fundamental humanness was being attacked by an insatiable thing-that-was-not-a-thing. No one could possibly resist such a threatening non-presence, not a powerful adult and certainly not a small child.

Today, I am increasingly sensing the same uncertainty. I experience a not dissimilar discomfort as I look and listen to the discourse and behaviors of an increasingly dissonant culture. And mine is not some reversion to moments of immature insecurity or the feebleness of second childhood. Something very disturbing is happening to the foundational ordering of this culture that no society, no matter how materially blessed, can endure.

The so-called “West” is at the tail-end of modernity. All the problems associated with “objectivity as reductionism,” in particular alienation, are giving way to those difficulties associated with claiming there is no objectivity at all, specifically anomy. With no blushing at the inconsistency, the absolute assertion is made that nothing is—in itself—true or good or beautiful. Both senses of that clause—“nothing is” and “no thing is”—are defiantly and self-contradictorily affirmed.

Amongst medieval Islamic scholars and with the Scholastics of western Europe, the claim was made that a “thing” was marked by “oneness” or identity of being. This identity was expressed in varying degrees both from within the self and through relationships with other entities in its environment. The different identities were described in terms of (at least) three “transcendentals,” that is, categories of characteristics that transcend all societies. Today these might be called “validity claims” (this latter term is from J. Habermas). The belief was that these fundamental categories are necessary to any meaningful understanding of reality. The content might vary according to location, time in history, past experiences, hopes for the future, etc., but all cultures and rational individuals had more or less coherent understandings of truth, goodness, and beauty. To these three transcendentals some moderns claimed “usefulness” should be added.

Certainly, the claim that one could reasonably (truthfully) find some intrinsic worth (goodness) in any and every other person was fundamental to the development of the social contract theory that has served as the foundation of Western social order since the eighteenth century. Even the possibility of objective beauty was shared, sometimes assuming its evidence not only in art or human appearance, but in architecture and nature, all the while acknowledging cultural and personal differences in taste. The thinking of Locke, Kant, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Douglass, Anthony, etc. depend on the possibility of epistemological validity. Shared access to objective reality, even while always epistemologically restricted, was seen as possible to a limited but functional extent.

Yet beginning in the late eighteenth century, beauty was losing its transcending status. Some in the Romantic Movement proclaimed its superiority over all other value claims, but increasingly the individual agent was presumed to be the subjective and sole determiner of beauty. The shift was not in acknowledging personal and cultural variation in particular expressions—for after all, matters of taste do vary and always have. Rather, this was a shift in the general definition. The “thing-in-itself” no longer bore beauty; it (or she or he) neither was nor was not beautiful. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” became a commonly accepted truism. The long Western (and, for that matter, universal) notion that a thing intrinsically held beauty and the agent was more or less capable of perceiving that beauty was increasingly denied. Beauty was no longer a predicate of the thing but a momentary condition of the observer’s mind. The skepticism of Hume seemingly had won, gaining popular ground as more and more “cultured despisers” came to the conclusion that “[b]eauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1799). Beauty became no more and no less than subjective taste, dependent on “the different humours of particular men … [and] the particular manners and opinions of our age and country” (David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, Literary, 1777). Amongst most academics, beauty was only nurture and whim, not an objective aspect of nature, except in the opinion of a few arguing for notions of sexual selection among the nineteenth-century Darwinists.

In the twentieth century, moral certainty disappeared. “Rightness” was no more. While the late modern use of the term “relativity” is rooted in physics, in ethics this was merely a borrowing to achieve legitimacy for an argument that is actually one asserting, paradoxically and ironically, the absolute nature of moral subjectivity. This claim was fertilized by the disillusionment following WWI and the dismay following the Holocaust and atomic bombings. It was popularized in a utilitarian form by Joseph Fletcher as “situation ethics.” His utility calculus required the maximization of love, but that “love” was subjective and so the notion of the “good”—as with beauty before it—became a matter of taste.

After the turn of the twenty-first century, the transcendental of “truth” was abandoned. The popular phrase of this phase of cultural dissolution has been, “This is my truth”—as if “truth” were but a matter of taste (as beauty and goodness had become). Of course, it is not that persons do not assert that truth matters, but rather that they alone have access to it. Somehow, the “truth” remains, but its accessibility is restricted. Due to supposed hatred, incapacity, or ignorance, any and all who disagree with the subjective declaration are deemed disobedient. The moral agent does not seek to convince or explain using a shared validity claim, but demands adherence. These most threateningly appear when a consortium forms, either as an aggrieved online mob or an unyielding bureaucracy of “experts.” The fallacy of argumentum ad baculum is subjectivism at its worst and the clearest evidence that truth is becoming immaterial—like that antagonistic man upon the stairs.

Recently, the editor-in-chief of one of the world’s leading scientific journals, Science, condemned several of the U.S. founding documents as having never been true and certainly never good. The implication was that these documents required replacement by the “useful” declarations of experts. While some of the specific criticisms leveled were valid, the list of supposed violations of expertise was suspiciously one-sided. The writer seemed to want the transcendental of the “truth,” though only on the condition that his pool of experts be deemed its vetters. He seemed oblivious to his own bias, perhaps resting on an illusory sense of superiority, or perhaps disingenuous elitism. He selectively excluded any reference to the “truth” that females are the bearers of offspring amongst primates (Holden H. Thorp, “The Court is Lost,” Science 377 [6605], 451). Perhaps this was no more than the selective outrage driven by a progressive political agenda or perhaps it was simply one more example of the siloed thinking so prevalent amongst all those deeply engaged in politics at the edge of postmodernity. Yet it is genuinely problematic when one of the last bastions of the notion of objective truth—intentionally or unintentionally—appears to violate, through omission, the very standard supposedly necessary for the project of scientific experts. 

According to that editorial, seemingly only expert-determined usefulness matters. Usefulness for what? And, why? If there is no shared basis for beauty, goodness, or truth—or any other validity claim besides usefulness, what is the end toward which society should work? If there is no foundation and there is no telos, then what is the “use” of anything? Is beauty gone? Is goodness gone? Is truth gone? What’s left? 

Of course, they are only gone objectively, not from discourse. In a sense, these transcendentals have not disappeared, but have been subjectivized or hyper-individualized. It is “my truth.” What I think is beautiful is so. It is good, but only if I say it is—especially if I am an “expert.” 

This plays out in current debates about sexuality. Some people assert that they alone can determine what is beautiful, and that only “haters” would contradict the appropriateness of any self-validated desire. And so, the sexualizing of children in the form of drag shows mimicking pornographic adult performances, even to the point of including the stuffing of bills into beltlines, is considered attractive. Why? Well, why not, if there is no constant of beauty and, correspondingly, no such thing as ugliness? And, certainly such treatment of children would have been previously considered ugly. What of the truth or goodness of such? The response is either to be offended that the question is asked or to be offended that the answer is not obvious. The point is not whether or not someone finds this enticing (for some no doubt do), but rather that society is now legitimating such expressions simply because they are expressions.

The good is to be lived out with superficial honesty by being “true to oneself” without constraint. Morality becomes a sort of performative egocentric existentialism. To “act out” according to such a whim is the only real moral good since self-indulgence, and nothing else, matters. The logic is one of hyper-subjectivist natural law (admittedly, an oxymoron in the historic sense of the term). And, it seems, the “experts” at the end of modernity deem their task as to be “useful,” asking only that the performance be elegantly acted out. 

Of course, this hyper-subjectivist ordering is completely arbitrary and unpredictable, so notions of personal accountability disappear—except, again, the requirement to therapeutically “affirm” everyone else’s self-expression. That means the only evil, under this social construct, is to deny the legitimacy of self-designated wants and thereby inhibit momentary satiation—and it is so egregious as to warrant immediate and vehement negation and perhaps permanent designation of the one who would question such as a “hater.” And, why not? Whatever can be truthfully known is up solely to oneself in the moment. Under this extreme individualistic epistemology, the individual alone, regardless of any variation or inconsistency through time, gets to self-designate “my truth.” 

Critics err in thinking the promotion of newly affirmed sexual and gender behaviors is a fundamental cause of social ill; cultural legitimation of sexual and gender amorphousness is but a presenting symptom. The rising anomy expresses itself not only in what is erroneously called “virtue signaling” about gender and sexuality, but also in the loss of a respect for the worthiness of the basic content of the transcendental values as (1) rooted in objectivity, and (2) commonly-shared, at some basic level.  

Indeed, why stop with the demand for appreciative sensitivity about sexual whims and crass incivility? Why not accept human selves as nothing more than vacillating bundles of sensory experiences? There is no self except in the instant; certainly the entity is not the same being in an intrinsic way through time, from past to future—and in a manner that can be truthfully discerned, as having some goodness, and even some beauty. 

There is no past or future for the “I,” no inside or outside of the self as there is no self, no “me” to be me. Who is the “I” if the being has nothing enduring that identifies beyond its own internal fickle assessment? There is no me to be me, just a passive receptor seeking momentary satiation. That medieval Islamic and Scholastic notion of the oneness of a thing, rooted in Aristotle and the pre-Socratics, and present in every culture recorded, is gone—disappearing along with the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth. 

And so, back to my childhood. Is “someone” walking upon the stairs? Does anyone have ongoing identity in any coherent sense? Is there an anyone? Is that person on the steps that cannot be seen a mid-20’s, 5’2” female with dark features who may live another five decades, or a late 60’s, Anglo male moving toward the end of life? Is she/ he/ it a person at all? And who cares since the term “person” loses all meaning?

I certainly do not wish he or she or it on the stairs would go away, as I once wanted of the entity or non-entity who wasn’t there so many years ago, when I first heard that scary poem. Rather, I want that person on the stairs to be deemed fully here. I want to discern the truth about who and what that being is in relation to me and as part of the larger social order. Further, I fully expect that s/he bears some degree of irrefutable beauty—both reflected and intrinsic—as the imago Dei. And, consequently, I am determined to treat that person in a “right” way. 

That person is the imago—a being of truth, goodness, and beauty. Out of respect for the imago Dei, I will support his/ her right to “act” as he or she wants. I could and should tolerate, at least to the extent that others are not thereby harmed, even aberrant behaviors freely chosen. Yet, I am not required to relinquish the social order to his/ her hyper-subjectivist whim. Nor need I not feel disgust at behaviors or sadness at a failed life. Indeed, I need to reject his or her epistemological incompetence in order meaningfully to render this person respect. The only alternatives are anomic nihilism or the anarchic mob or technocratic totalitarian—all of which are false in their understanding, wrong in their treatment of persons, and ugly in their character.

Perhaps that man was not on the stairs and I was only imagining. But, if he was there, then he was there for everyone and, most assuredly, so am I and so are you. Anyone not blinded by fear or ignorance or self-aggrandizing status seeking can see that and act accordingly. The very late modern West’s epistemological failure does not bode well—too many in our society fear that which is not here and are seemingly oblivious to what is objectively apparent—and so we teeter at the edge of oblivion, be its form anarchic or totalitarian.

James R. Thobaben is Dean of the School of Theology and Formation and Professor of Bioethics and Social Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, KY.