Questioning totality in the understanding of human persons

Howard Thurman insists that a person that encounters “God” enounters with the totality of their person (The Creative Encounter). I like reading Thurman. However, in reading him today I have new questions. Today, I question the notion of totality.

A person does not encounter any aspect of their life in “totality” as the whole of a person’s life is not equally engaged or equally present in any moment. I doubt “totality” is ever possible.

Surely totality is greater than the physical presence of a person. And it cannot be merely the “spiritual” side of a person since the physical body fully impacts the human spirit (however defined). If the human spirit is psychologically based, all psychological understandings of a person emphasize the hidden, unknown, or unfathomed aspects of the human psyche such that while these can and do affect the person, they are not fully present at any time. The human psyche is not static but morphs and develops in response to interactions in the world (see Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents for a classic exposition).

More importantly, the “totality” of a person is dependent on the social environment in which they participate (Emmanuel Levinas develops this philosophically; Alfred Schutz develops this sociologically). Individuals become different in different settings, calling forth different aspects of the self, stimulating constructions and re-constructions of the self out of available resources (Erving Goffman is great here). Props, rituals, and, especially, particular audiences with particular expectations are inherent to the continual enactments of ourselves.

I believe Thurman is motivated by a deep desire to affirm the dignity of individual human beings. Drawing on forms of mysticism, Thurman wishes to release the human spirit, believing truth is birthed from within human beings rather than imposed on them from without.

Yet, The life of persons involves response to reactions to a person; for example, some environments invoke racial superiority/inferiority of people while others do not. Thurman in other writings rightly shows how the injustice of racial attributions and discriminatory actions and attitudes impact human beings. The totality of a person in these aspects of Thurman’s writings is forced unavoidably to respond to historically arbritrary understandings of persons. This aspect of the self becomes part of the “totality” of the self only situationally. Some might say a person’s race is part of their totality, but critical research in this area overwhelmingly reveals that race is selectively invoked and with great variability across history and geography.

Totality, then, may be a heuristic concept in an attempt to come to terms with whole persons. Yet, totality is much too individualistic, tends to ignore social structure, and attempts to streamline the complexities of the human self. It easily becomes misguided in leaning toward an essentialist interpretation of persons.

Because God is defined within orthodoxy as being “all-seeing” and “all-knowing,” Thurman and others with a theological stance believe human beings approach and are approached by God in their totality. Like Adam in the garden, we are naked and vulnerable before God. With Thurman and others, it is assumed that individuals bring with them accumulated experiences into their person. Like sticky fly-paper, human beings accumulate and integrate everything about them; Adam appears along with his sin and shame. Human totality is an ever-growing balloon of inner/outer thoughts and occurences resulting in the person one is in their ever-present existence.

There is something about this understanding of totality before God that is both frightening and attractive. I don’t want God to see everything about me. I want God to reveal things about me. I don’t want to be condemned for who I am in my totality. I want to be accepted in my totality.

Even before God, the encounter (Thurman’s Creative Encounter) illicits new aspects of the self. It leaves certain things behind, making them irrelevant, and generates new aspects of self. On the Damascus Road, Saul becomes Paul; a new self emerges. Did God encounter the totality of Saul? Is Paul the new totality? Is the notion of totality only meaningful in relation to an omnipresent, omniscient God?

If totality cannot adequately represent human-to-human relations and only God-to-human relations, the notion has severely limited utility. And such notions developed paradigmatically in God-to-human relations (for example, Martin Buber’s brilliant book I and Thou) will keep us from adequately understanding the more contextually-dependent, multiply-invoked self of everyday life.